Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie’s Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter is not an exciting read. However, it is a good catalogue of group decision-making research (leading to this post to also be somewhat of a catalogue) and worth reading for an overview. The book’s theme is that group decisions are often better than individual decisions, but that groups have weaknesses that can impair outcomes. Much of the analysis of failures in group decision-making follows a similar theme to the research into individual judgement and decision-making, in that the research has generated a long list of “biases” that groups are subject to.

What I’ve been listening to recently: Shane Parrish’s blog Farnam Street is a favourite of mine. His podcast The Knowledge Project is also worth a listen. I recommend the episodes featuring Michael Mauboussin (1 and 2), Rory Sutherland (if you’ve seen Rory speak before, the half hour gap between Shane’s first attempt to wind up the conversation and the end of the episode will come as no surprise), Susan Cain (my review of Quiet), Adam Grant (I disagree with his perspective on the replication crisis) and Chris Voss (I recommend Voss’s book, Never Split the Difference).

My Behavioral Scientist article, Don’t Touch The Computer was in part a reaction to Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson’s book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. In particular, I felt their story of freestyle chess as an illustration of how humans and machines can work together was somewhat optimistic. I have just read McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.

Mike Walsh recently interviewed me for his Between Worlds Podcast, and here is the result. I largely talk about the material in two of my Behavioral Scientist articles on algorithm aversion (1 and 2). https://soundcloud.com/mikewalsh/jason-collins I listened to some of the Between Worlds back catalogue, and I recommend the following with David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene. https://soundcloud.com/mikewalsh/david-epstein-on-genetics-kenyan-marathon-runners-and-the-art-of-finding-fighter-pilots

From an 80,000 hours podcast episode: **Robert Wiblin:** Are you a super forecaster yourself? Philip Tetlock: No. I could tell you a story about that. I actually thought I could be, I would be. So in the second year of the forecasting tournament, by which time I should’ve known enough to know this was a bad idea. I decided I would enter into the forecasting competition and make my own forecasts.

My journey into understanding human decision making started when I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball in 2005. The punchline - which, as it turns out, has been known across numerous domains since at least the 1950s - is that “expert” judgement is often outperformed by simple statistical analysis. A couple of years later I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and was diverted into the world of Gary Klein, which then led me to Kahneman and Tversky among others.

In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth argues that outstanding achievement comes from a combination of passion - a focused approach to something you deeply care about - and perseverance - a resilience and desire to work hard. Duckworth calls this combination of passion and perseverance “grit”. For Duckworth, grit is important as focused effort is required to both build skill and turn that skill into achievement. Talent plus effort leads to skill.

Over at Behavioral Scientist is my latest contribution. From the intro: The first American astronauts were recruited from the ranks of test pilots, largely due to convenience. As Tom Wolfe describes in his incredible book The Right Stuff, radar operators might have been better suited to the passive observation required in the largely automated Mercury space capsules. But the test pilots were readily available, had the required security clearances, and could be ordered to report to duty.

If you have read Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality, there will be few surprises for you in his TED book Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations. TED books are designed to be slightly longer explorations of topics from TED talks, but short enough to be read in one sitting. That makes it an easy, enjoyable, but not particularly deep read, with most of the results covered in The Upside.

From an interesting a16z podcast episode Putting AI in Medicine, in Practice (I hope I got the correct names against who is saying what): _Mintu Turakhia (cardiologist at Stanford and Director of the Centre for Digital Health):_ AI is not new to medicine. Automated systems in healthcare have been described since the 1960s. And they went through various iterations of expert systems and neural networks and called many different things. Hanne Tidnam: In what way would those show up in the 60s and 70s.