I saw the answer hinted at in a paper released mid last-year (covered on WNYC), but Daniel Engber has now put together a more persuasive case: Ten years ago last fall, Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam published an alarming scoop: The truth was useless. His story started with a flyer issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to counter lies about the flu vaccine. The flyer listed half a dozen statements labeled either “true” or “false”—“Not everyone can take flu vaccine,” for example, or “The side effects are worse than the flu” —along with a paragraph of facts corresponding to each one.

The replication crisis has ruined my ability to relax while reading a book built on social psychology foundations. The rolling sequence of interesting but small sample and possibly not replicable findings leaves me somewhat on edge. Shlomo Benartzi’s (with Jonah Lehrer) The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior (2015) is one such case. Sure, I accept there is a non-zero probability that a 30 millisecond exposure to the Apple logo could make someone more creative than exposure to the IBM logo.

The best books I read in 2017 - generally released in other years - are below (in no particular order). Where I have reviewed, the link leads to that review. Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (2013): In a world where so much attention is on technology, a great discussion of the need to consider the psychology of the users. David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (2013): The best examination of nature versus nurture as it relates to performance that I have read.

I have been meaning to write some notes on Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics for some time, but having now come across a review by Paul Ormerod (ungated pdf) - together with his perspective on the position of behavioural economics in the discipline - I feel somewhat less need. Below are some interesting sections of Ormerod’s review. First, on the incorporation of psychology into economics: With a few notable exceptions, psychologists themselves have not engaged with the area.

One interesting thread to Don Norman’s excellent The Design of Everyday Things is the idea that while our tools and technologies are subject to constant change, humans stay the same. The fundamental psychology of humans is a relative constant. Evolutionary change to people is always taking place, but the pace of human evolutionary change is measured in thousands of years. Human cultures change somewhat more rapidly over periods measured in decades or centuries.

Much of the storytelling about the future and humans and machines runs with a theme that machines will not replace us, but that we will work with machines to create a combination greater than either alone. If you have heard the freestyle chess example, which now seems to be everywhere, you will understand the idea. (See my article in Behavioral Scientist if you haven’t.) An interesting angle to this relationship is just how unsuited some of our existing human-machine combinations are for the unique skills of a human brings.

As I mentioned in my comments on Coursera’s Executive Data Science specialisation, I have looked at a lot of online data science and statistics courses to find useful training material, understand the skills of people who have done these online courses, plus learn a bit myself. One of the best known sets of courses is Coursera’s Data Science Specialisation, created by John Hopkins University. It is a ten course program that covers the data science process from data collection to the production of data science products.

A typical story in Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies runs like this. We start with a plant, airplane, ship, biology laboratory, or other setting with a lot of components (parts, procedures, operators). Then we need two or more failures among components that interact in some unexpected way. No one dreamed that when X failed, Y would also be out of order and the two failures would interact so as to both start a fire and silence the fire alarm.

From Tim Harford: [I]n many areas of life we demand action when inaction would serve us better. The most obvious example is in finance, where too many retail investors trade far too often. One study, by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, found that the more retail investors traded, the further behind the market they lagged: active traders underperformed by more than 6 percentage points (a third of total returns) while the laziest investors enjoyed the best performance.

I have a lot of sympathy for Adam Alter’s case in Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching. Despite the abundant benefits of being online, the hours I have burnt over the last 20 years through aimless internet wandering and social media engagement could easily have delivered a book or another PhD. It’s unsurprising that we are surrounded by addictive tech. Game, website and app designers are all designing their products to gain and hold our attention.