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Dear diary: Today I did a very good job at something where the extent to which I did a good job doesn’t matter and should. It is a little depressing!
Jeff Johnson, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Well, what do you expect from a memoir by a tattoist? A lot of swaggering anecdotes, complete with explosions and vomit: he is a rough guy who lives in a world of other rough guys, drunks, druggies, guys (and the occasional girl) who will fuck you up, etc. What you will not get: a narrative throughline or a chronological progression. Like many non-writer artists writing about their art, sometimes he tries too hard to use poetic language to describe things that may not be susceptible to translation into written language, or just leaves the reader with a sense that he is summarizing a lot of aesthetic reaction too briefly to convey what’s really going on. Thus, I’m left wondering about the real details and impact of the various shifts in tattoo aesthetics and technological enablement that he repeatedly mentions. (Pictures wouldn’t have hurt, either.)
Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide: If you’ve read a bunch of behavioral economics, this will not have much new. Emotions are important in decisionmaking! Instincts are good, but only if they’re properly trained! The stuff that was new to me was about decisionmaking during a crisis while flying a plane. It’s sensible, yet oddly compelling, that the availability of flight simulators has reduced previously irreducible pilot error to a small fraction of plane troubles.
Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Sadly, Thaler and Sunstein use most of the same key research and examples as Lehrer, so doubling up was not wise. They are more policy-oriented than Lehrer: they want to change various defaults so that people do smarter things based, essentially, on the inertia of the status quo, along with a dose of changing the salience of various attributes of our possible choices. So they want to get more people saving for retirement by making enrollment in retirement plans the default, and by allowing people to choose now to save just a little bit but increase their contributions over time—it’s a lot easier to say “I’ll save money later” than to say “I’ll save money today,” but by the time later rolls around, inertia makes it less likely that you’ll change your mind, and so you’ll start saving more. Wonky popularizing stuff: if you didn’t know the behavioral economics background, this would be a chewy introduction.
Jeff Johnson, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Well, what do you expect from a memoir by a tattoist? A lot of swaggering anecdotes, complete with explosions and vomit: he is a rough guy who lives in a world of other rough guys, drunks, druggies, guys (and the occasional girl) who will fuck you up, etc. What you will not get: a narrative throughline or a chronological progression. Like many non-writer artists writing about their art, sometimes he tries too hard to use poetic language to describe things that may not be susceptible to translation into written language, or just leaves the reader with a sense that he is summarizing a lot of aesthetic reaction too briefly to convey what’s really going on. Thus, I’m left wondering about the real details and impact of the various shifts in tattoo aesthetics and technological enablement that he repeatedly mentions. (Pictures wouldn’t have hurt, either.)
Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide: If you’ve read a bunch of behavioral economics, this will not have much new. Emotions are important in decisionmaking! Instincts are good, but only if they’re properly trained! The stuff that was new to me was about decisionmaking during a crisis while flying a plane. It’s sensible, yet oddly compelling, that the availability of flight simulators has reduced previously irreducible pilot error to a small fraction of plane troubles.
Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Sadly, Thaler and Sunstein use most of the same key research and examples as Lehrer, so doubling up was not wise. They are more policy-oriented than Lehrer: they want to change various defaults so that people do smarter things based, essentially, on the inertia of the status quo, along with a dose of changing the salience of various attributes of our possible choices. So they want to get more people saving for retirement by making enrollment in retirement plans the default, and by allowing people to choose now to save just a little bit but increase their contributions over time—it’s a lot easier to say “I’ll save money later” than to say “I’ll save money today,” but by the time later rolls around, inertia makes it less likely that you’ll change your mind, and so you’ll start saving more. Wonky popularizing stuff: if you didn’t know the behavioral economics background, this would be a chewy introduction.
