The introduction to this book will be music to the ears of lunch retailers. It promises: "We'll learn how we make better decisions if we've had a sandwich." Does it follow that we ought to eat sandwiches all day, one every half hour, for fear of making a bad decision if we skip one? But if the sandwich is too large, might our bloatedness harm our decision-making too? What about if we eat a salad or a pizza instead?
Popular non-fiction guides to human behaviour nearly all work in the same way: they arouse the reader's interest with singular findings, then derive from them what are always called "lessons". Eyes Wide Open sticks to the formula. Noreena Hertz uses examples from medicine, entertainment, and politics – at one point unveiling the generically perfect subtitle, What We Can Learn from Victoria's Secret Models and Fizzy Drinks. She promises to explain how to make "better" or "smarter" decisions. (Here as elsewhere, "smart" is usually a more cultured-sounding codeword for "profitable".) Making decisions is something we need help with more than ever, she says, because of the modern "data deluge". So many options; so many alleged facts. How to choose? What to believe?
The ubiquity of such books offering self-help guidance seems to imply that we are now a culture of Buridan's asses: we are all at risk of being the beast that couldn't choose between two tasty-looking piles of hay, and so starved to death in the middle. Presumably the chronically indecisive, before buying this book, would first need a book-length guide to how to choose books about making decisions. And how would they ever settle on that one?
Hertz apes the genre's form well, but she also knows that the plural of anecdote is not data. So her book embodies an intriguing conflict between authorial thoughtfulness and commercial expectations. The introduction is shamelessly pulpy: its excessive italicisation and one-line paragraphs give it the feel of a gravel-voiced action-movie trailer or trashy novel, in a kind of spiritual self-improvement mode. (It's all about "self-empowerment".) But Hertz also confesses: "What it is impossible to do in this book [...] is to give you one over-arching, catch-all strategy to follow. This isn't about 'blinking', or 'nudging', or trusting 'the Wisdom of Crowds', and leaving it at that." This sounds like pre-emptive genre anxiety; and in many ways, Hertz goes on to teach the reader to be wary of just such books as the one she is writing.
For example, she advises that we should beware of concentrating excessively on things in "bold typeface", which are generally simplifications. At the end of each chapter, she supplies a list of tips in, er, bold type. We should be careful, too, about relying on summaries, because "key details and subtleties may well be overlooked". Which is very true, though this very book also summarises lots of research findings and the appropriate "lessons" to draw from them. Another thing we should be sceptical of, Hertz rightly advises, is bogus precision: some things just can't be as precisely quantified as people claim. Yet elsewhere she cites a study allegedly showing that in open-plan offices, "the constant background buzz of other colleagues and office equipment makes us 66% less productive". Not 67% or 65%, mind you.
The weakest part of her book inveighs against "experts" and "gatekeepers", echoing the modish way in which Silicon Valley experts and gatekeepers love to denigrate their less powerful counterparts in other industries. We live under a "tyranny of the experts", Hertz writes. "This is no exaggeration." (If you have to write "This is no exaggeration", you probably know it is an exaggeration.) "Did you know," she asks, "that studies have shown that doctors misdiagnose one time in six?" Here the alert reader might remember Hertz highlighting the fact that people think differently about a problem if exactly the same numerical ratio is presented in a different way. Thus primed, let's have a go at reframing her number about mistaken doctors. The same statistic could be expressed by saying that doctors arrive at the correct diagnosis more than 83% of the time. Doesn't sound so terrible, does it?
She is too sensible not to add so much qualification and nuance that she essentially ends up saying we need experts; it's just that they should be a bit more humble. Disarmingly, she admits to being an "expert" herself (an adviser to governments and companies), though she doesn't quite spell out the meta-expert role she is playing in this part of the book: she is an expert telling us to beware of experts because she is an expert in what experts don't know about the thing they're supposedly expert at.
Not all of the book is so subversively self-undermining. There are some good parts on the emotive wordsmithery of political and marketing Unspeak ("Estée Lauder has just launched a 'youth infusing serum' for eyes"), or on how to apply the correct probabilistic reasoning to medical test results (something many doctors get wrong). Statistics and their manipulation give rise, indeed, to most of this book's best passages. A section near the end demonstrates with splendid clarity how easy it is to massage the truth (or concoct outright lies) in a graph, simply by fiddling subtly with the y-axis. This is the kind of thing that is inherently interesting, and could certainly arm the reader against being bamboozled in future by similar effects. But it doesn't translate into a practical life tip of the sort that books like Eyes Wide Open are sold as delivering.
So Hertz offers a lot of those too. Try answering your emails in batches. If you are a French waitress, wear a red T-shirt rather than any other colour: that way you'll get more tips. Be suspicious of anonymous online reviews. Find out who funded scientific studies. Oh, and "be a rebel". That one is from the vaguely Steve Jobsian bullet-pointed catechism at the end. It's in bold type, of course.
