Robert Burton
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…
ddobbs | December 27, 2007
The best things I read this year, in no particular order:
"Falling Man: A Novel" (Don DeLillo)"Tree of Smoke: A Novel" (Denis Johnson) This is almost cheating, as I'm still in the midst of reading it. But it'd have to dive a long way in the last few pages to not stay on the list. I'll be brave and leave it in. [Update: I fond this disappointing in the end; the last quarter did not sustain the apparent brilliance of the first half."The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)" (T. H. White). Before he wrote the incomparable <em>The Once and Future King</em>, T.H. White trained a…