Married Love - Tessa Hadley

This collection of powerful and intriguing short stories is superbly well written - most of the stories had at least one moment that made me linger over it. Many of these were because of the clarity with which an insightful observation was described: "He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won't be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can't stop now.", "And I thought: I will always be the tame one, watching while she risks everything. I believed then that this meant I would be safe at least.", or "This tension of thwarted longing - even when they were on their own and could do whatever they liked - was somehow the whole character of their relationship. Sheila was always frantic for the next thing she didn't have from Neil; the sensation was as painful as wire spooled taut in her chest. She wondered sometimes what would become of them if the spool gave way and the tension slackened."

This collection displayed the precision and economy of the best short story writing, particularly in resonant moments like the mother unblocking a sink while reminiscing about her absent soldier son and wondering about the things he's seen in Afghanistan, when "hearing the boy flush the toilet in the cubicle behind her, she scooped up the nasty mess with some paper towels and dropped it into the black bag she had with her for rubbish, so that he would not have to see it." Similarly, in several of the stories the most significant events are not directly described - an illicit encounter where "their knees touched" sets the reader wondering about the subsequent baby's "mysterious black baby hair". Even in the most romantic story, the ultimate realisation of love is only hinted at (beautifully - "He knows he ought to marry Ellen Pearson and get a house full of furniture. But he can't. He won't.") and left to unfold 'offstage', but the spite and scorn that the central character has previously tried to arm himself with was described in detail. I admired this collection immensely but did not love it; the short story form seems to lend itself to a particular, slightly bleak, view of human relationships, which I found a little sad.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

This fascinating book is full of insights into human judgement and decision making, with an emphasis on the Nobel-winning collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, in which they challenged the idea that human thinking is fundamentally rational, and showed how “systematic errors” of judgement can be explained, not by emotional interference, but by “the design of the machinery of cognition”.  The book includes two of Kahneman & Tversky’s key papers, including 1974’s “Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases”, in which they presented three major heuristics that we use to answer questions about probabilities or estimated values (representativeness, availability, and adjustment from an anchor) and demonstrated a range of biases that each frequently gives rise to.  The “fast and slow” thinking of the title refers to the “two systems” or modes of thought that much of the book discusses: the automatic, quick, involuntary and intuitive “System 1”, and the effortful, slow, complex and logical “System 2”.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book was the inclusion of lots of striking case studies and experimental results, such as:

• An office kitchen honesty box where the level of contributions increased sharply when an image of eyes “primed” the idea of being watched;
• Zajonc’s classic experiment demonstrating our liking for the familiar, where made up words were more likely to be judged to mean something good if the participant had previously seen them;
• Kahneman’s own discomfort as an examiner when he realised how strongly his grades for subsequent questions were influenced by the first essay he’d read from that student (a “halo effect”);
• Experiments where the ratings of competence given based on brief viewings of politician’s faces (generally higher for faces having “a strong chin with a slight confident-appearing smile”) correctly predicted (with around 70% success) the winner in an election;
• “Anchoring effects” where even an obviously random number picked on a wheel of fortune influences estimated answers to numeric questions, and even estate agents are influenced by the asking price when valuing a house, despite claiming not to be;
• An analysis showing the absence of any persistent variation in the results obtained by professional investment advisors, suggesting that successful stock picking is a matter of chance rather than skill – hard to believe because “we are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random”;
• A few shocking illustrations of the “planning fallacy” where forecasts are “unrealistically close to best-case scenarios” because others’ experiences and potential setbacks are not considered – such as Kahneman’s own team of textbook writers (who estimated they had two years’ work left, then learned that similar projects had a 40% failure rate and took around eight years if they did complete, but persevered anyway, finishing eight years later when the book was no longer in demand), and the Scottish Parliament building, originally budgeted at £40 million but finally completed for £431 million;
• An illustration of the costly effects of loss-aversion, where self-imposed goals act as reference points for our decisions, such as the New York cab drivers who go home early on (potentially high-earning) rainy days because they’ve met their daily targets, and work long hours on sunny ones when fares are scarce;
• A graph on reported life satisfaction, showing a peak at the time people got married and a sharp dip afterwards, which becomes less disturbing when read as “a graph of the likelihood that people will think of their recent or forthcoming marriage when asked about their life”.

Although I’m sure I’m still susceptible to the many biases described in this book, I have noticed my own thinking to be changed by the ideas described here on several occasions.  I found myself including “the law of small numbers” (that “small samples yield extreme results more often”) in a mental list of possible reasons for the difference in litter distribution in different areas of my road.  I once shouted “regression to the mean” at the TV when a presenter spoke of poor performance following a win as a “curse”.  I resisted the urge to throw in extra items when selling on eBay, because I’d learned that people evaluate sets by forming an impression of the average or typical item, and therefore adding lower-value items can actually devalue the entire set.  More significantly, two sections of this book have led to my strangely calm and agreeable attitude to a potentially life-changing decision that last year filled me with dread.  Firstly, I became convinced that much of my resistance to a big change is probably because our innate loss aversion makes us value what we already have more than what we might gain (“the disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, inducing a bias that favours the status quo”).  Secondly, I was reminded that, because even a drastic change like paralysis only affects people’s mental state when they’re focused on it, and other things regain focus over time, “nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it”.

Some of the questions raised in this book are extremely hard to answer – such as whether people’s reluctance to automate life-or-death decisions, based on the “stubborn psychological reality” that “for most people, the cause of a mistake matters”, making a death caused by computer error seem more tragic than one caused by a human, should be overruled if an algorithm is available that makes fewer mistakes than a human expert.  I particularly struggled with the material in the final section about the contrast between the evaluations and priorities of the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (which disregards the duration of experiences, basing evaluations instead on moments of peak intensity and the way situations end).  Despite acknowledging that “memories are all we get to keep from the experience of living”, Kahneman mostly presents our tendency to base our decisions on the priorities of the “remembering self” as a mistake, but I felt (with my own experience of childbirth in mind) that – since we only experience each situation once but live with the memory of it for the rest of our lives – the emphasis on memory seemed reasonable, although choosing to disregard lived experience does of course raise major concerns. This section seemed to suggest more questions than it answered, such as the challenging question of whether medical interventions should be prioritised and designed based on how feared a condition is, how much suffering people actually experience in their daily lives, or how they evaluate their situation when reflecting on it.

In his conclusion, Kahneman notes with regret that in attempting to improve judgements and decisions, “little can be achieved without a considerable amount of effort”, and that the main route to avoid biases is to learn enough about them to recognise situations where errors occur, and then to consciously slow down and engage System 2.  He does also present some helpful advice and techniques though:

• “Decorrelate error” by making judgements as independent as possible, e.g. when conducting a meeting, ask each participant to summarise their opinions in writing first;
• In single-issue negotiations, avoid anchoring effects by going first if possible, and if you think the other side has made an outrageous offer, “make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear – to yourself as well as to the other side – that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table”;
• Before making significant decisions, hold a “pre-mortem” meeting where people imagine a disastrous outcome for the currently favoured plan;
• Start by considering base rates and averages when making estimates and predictions, e.g. always obtain and use statistics from similar projects as a baseline when making predictions, and consider how strong the correlation is between the predictors you’re considering and the result;
• Use simple checklists and formulas (such as the Apgar score) to assist with decision making – e.g. conduct interviews with standardized, factual questions, using “a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits” to rate candidates;
• Use “risk policies” such as “never buy extended warranties” to group gambles together when considering potential losses and gains, and remember that “you win a few, you lose a few”;
• Remember that “intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment”, and that experts are only reliable when they have experienced good feedback from a predictable environment.

Perhaps more controversially, he also concludes (with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the authors of “Nudge”) that the vulnerability of human decision making to biases, particularly the powerful impact of framing effects, means that people “often need help to make more accurate judgements and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help”.  The “libertarian paternalism” advocated here consists of things like making pension plans opt-out rather than opt-in, and regulating the way that messages of importance are communicated (such as displaying the more intuitive “gallons-per-mile” alongside mpg on new cars) in order to provide a “nudge” towards decisions believed to serve people’s long-term interests.

Early in the book, Kahneman describes experiments using problems with intuitively appealing wrong answers that could be solved correctly with only a little mental effort.  He describes people who are more able to resist the tempting fallacies (presumably by deliberately slowing down to check their initial answer and search their memories for additional relevant facts) as “more alert, more mentally active, less willing to be satisfied by superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions”.  According to Keith Stanovich, these qualities are not guaranteed by the possession of high “algorithmic” intelligence, but rather constitute a separate ability, “rationality” (or being “engaged”, as Kahneman describes it).  It would appear that this is the aptitude that we need to develop if we wish to avoid some of the pitfalls described so convincingly in this book.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

This classic Gaiman fantasy adventure manages to pack in a lot of thoughtful observations about childhood ("Adults follow paths. Children explore.") and the nature of memory ("Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.") I loved the opening epigraph, a quote from Maurice Sendak that sets the tone perfectly: "I remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." There were some powerful and insightful scenes, such as the father trying to drown his son in the bath while under the influence of an evil spirit, but failing because of his grim determination not to hit his children as he was hit, and the child's later announcement when presented with the possibility of erasing that portion of time that he wants to remember it "because it happened to me. And I'm still me." The ending, where the narrator's briefly regained memories and understanding fade away once again, is beautiful and bittersweet.

Snapper - Brian Kimberling

I found this book a little disconcerting, as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but came away unsure what it had been about. The writing was captivating and full of humorous observations, with a believable and likeable central character, and lots of atmospheric detail about the Indiana setting. The book was written as a collection of episodes from various times in one man's life, but as his approach to life was mostly passive and reactive, and the anecdotes often focused on apparent trivia while only mentioning major life-changing events in passing, it didn't ever coalesce into a conventional novel. I don't think that this was a weakness, however; instead it felt like an accurate reflection of how arbitrary and chaotic life can often appear when compared to the neat and meaningful narrative arcs of fiction, and how the things and people that capture our attention are not necessarily the ones that will appear significant in hindsight.

The Woman Who Dived into the Heart of the World - Sabina Berman

I had an ambivalent reaction to this autism-from-the-inside story about a girl whose aunt finds her in a feral state and helps her to (almost) integrate back into society. 'Me' is an engaging character and her differences and perspective are well observed - I particularly enjoyed a scene where she is baffled that a crowd is moved to tears when her fear of public speaking leads her to sob while reciting a list of facts and figures about tuna processing, with her echolalia repeating certain phrases as though for emphasis. I also found myself constructively challenged by her disdain for the human emphasis on thinking and her eventual conclusion that the key to existence is to "plug back into the real world with every sense". However, I found her sophisticated level of language implausible for someone who acquired it so late, and it was unsettling that the way she used her unique perspective to devise innovative methods of humane fishing was so similar to the work of Temple Grandin, and yet this was not acknowledged anywhere in the book.

Love and other Dangerous Chemicals - Anthony Copella

A witty and erudite, but also rather sweet, look at human sexuality and emotions, using an unexpected romance between a pair of hyper-intellectuals in a sexology lab to make some good points about the nature of attraction and arousal, and academic versus emotional intelligence and awareness.

How to Talk So Kids Can Learn - Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish

Having already read books on parent-child communication and parenting siblings by the same authors, I found most of this to be a recap of their previous advice, with the examples transposed from the home to the classroom. It was useful to be reminded of some of their key principles (such as acknowledging children's feelings, problem-solving together, and focusing on descriptions of specific incidents rather than general evaluations), but there was not much genuinely new material. The main addition was a chapter on 'the parent-teacher partnership', advising parents to always begin discussions by describing something positive about the teacher's work, before describing what they feel the child needs and sharing any relevant information about the child's home situation and behaviour.  I was also struck by a couple of quotes on the inadequacy of punishment:

"When a child is punished he resolves to be more careful, not more honest and responsible." - Haim Ginott

"Punishment can control misbehavior, but by itself it will not teach desirable behavior or even reduce the desire to misbehave." - Albert Bandura