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So the other day I read through the book _Thinking in Bets_ by Annie Duke. I'm a total sucker for books about cognition, decisions making, habits, &c. So this was a very in-character read.
It was _alright_. So if you're not familiar with ideas like "hyperbolic discounting", "commitment devices", "motivated reasoning" then you aren't such a dweeb for this genre that you've already seen a lot of the content of this book already. In that case, you'll find a nice, breezy book that explains some stuff about how decisions are made, how behavioral economics works, and how to keep yourself honest.
It's not a terribly deep book which is fine because I don't think it's supposed to be. The core idea is really that making bets about things, even hypothetically, let's you
Now I like stuff like Beeminder, which is a commitment device where you say you'll do X quantifiable thing or pay Y amount of money. This book made me realize, though, that Beeminder pledges can either be seen as a promise or as betting with them that you **can** do X and you're so confident you're putting Y on the line.
So again if you're not someone who's read a bunch of pop-economics books or books on decision making and thinking or things like that then it's not a bad book. If you have then there's probably not much new here that's interesting and it's pretty skimmable.
Okay, so I said there was a bonus rant and here it is: on the weirdest part of this book and "viewpoint diversity".
So at one point in the book the author is trying to argue that you need a diversity of voices for decision making because it improves the quality of decisions made. Okay. That's not a weird thing to say and is, dare I say it, fairly obvious.
Then it goes where most people go when they use the phrase "viewpoint diversity" and that's "why aren't there more conservatives in academia?! there are too many liberals and that's bad". And then my soul leaves my body in sheer frustration. Which is weird because I didn't know I had one of those.
Okay, so for my non-americans in the audience I probably need to explain what's so damnably tilting about all of this. This a fairly recent book, written after the 2016 election, which is important context because at this point here's a brief incomplete list of people who get labeled "liberal" in the US: capitalists who aren't anti-abortion, marxists, social anarchists, gay people who aren't named Andrew Sullivan, feminists, anti-feminists who aren't Christian, people who didn't vote for Trump, and anyone in favor of environmental regulation.
It's one of most meaningless, overused labels in this country, and that's _always_ the trick when "viewpoint diversity" comes up here. "Oh why are there so many damn liberals in Z field? Why, it's an echo chamber!" But the net is cast so wide that what it really means is "why are there so many people who aren't conservative with a very narrow range of values who also always vote for the republican party?" Yeah, gee, I don't know. Damn mystery there.
And the double annoyance for me is that, well, there _are_ echo chambers in a lot of fields and academia absolutely needs more "viewpoint diversity" but this narrow band of American conservatives have managed to poison the well on that topic by making everything about them.
So, there, that's the bonus rant.