Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational
came out in early 2008, drawing on
a long career of scholarly research in
behavioral economics to show a general audience that the logical, rational
decisions they thought they were
making were, in fact, nothing of the
sort. Our minds are constantly playing
tricks on us. Take, for example, the
placebo effect, which has become only
more powerful as drug companies air
more ads touting their wares. Ariely’s
work has taken this much further,
showing how aspirin that cost more
become more effective because we
believe they must be. Ariely doesn’t
think people can be made to stop
being irrational; context, comparison,
and emotional cues are simply too
strong a set of triggers to beat. But
he does think we can be taught to
understand our own irrationality, and
to spot it and maybe work around it
when it happens.
His book came out right before the
financial market crash, when a series
of unimaginably irrational financial
bubbles burst. As an economist, used
to hearing his colleagues claim that
the free market was a self-righting
rational system, there must have
been some bitter satisfaction at being
proved right, though at far too dear a
cost. This new edition takes on what
happened in that crisis, explaining in
lucid terms precisely how even highly
educated financial professionals fell
prey to the same thinking traps as
poor homebuyers.
Rationally, you can buy the paper-
back of the original edition for less
than the hardcover is likely to cost; I
expect Ariely would have something
to say about the decision-making
process around the purchase. Either
way, the book will tell you things
about yourself you could not have
guessed, and books that do that are
rare, no matter what context you hap-
pen to find them in.
Total Recall: How the
E-Memory Revolution Will
Change Everything
Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Dutton Books
ISBN: 9780525951346
$26.95
Gordon Bell is one of the founding
figures of modern computing. He
designed several of the earliest minicomputers and oversaw development
of the VAX. However, unlike many of
his peers, he’s probably best known
for what he’s doing now. As a researcher and his own experimental subject at
Microsoft Research, Bell is attempting
to capture everything he can about
his own life, so he never has to forget
anything.
It’s telling that as I was reading
Total Recall, I came across another
new book called Delete: The Virtue
of Forgetting in the Digital Age by
Victor Mayer-Schönberger. Now
that we can capture every moment
of our existence in digital recordings
and text files, do we really want to?
Bell’s vision of a lifetime record of
everything we do and see, from birth
to death, strikes me as creepy, something between the Panopticon and a
doomed attempt to circumvent mortality through data. Besides, do you
want perfect recall of your high school
junior prom? Bell makes a compelling
case for the virtue of saving your personal history, but like most evangelists
for a cause, he doesn’t seem to see the
potential downside of what he’s doing.
Which is fine. On its own merits,
the book is an interesting, if somewhat thin, telling of how Bell, Jim
Gemmell, and other likeminded
researchers have been driving toward
a vision of a perfect capture system,
how he uses it, and some of what he’s
learned along the way. But as Bell
notes, we are all capturing more and
more data about ourselves, in systems
like Delicious and Evernote, let alone
social tools like Facebook and Twitter.
A more balanced account of the value
of remembering, and of when to let go
of the past, would be welcome to help
us navigate this brave new world.
