Hacking Your Mind Part 2 Review
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, talks about how he thought he had made this big discovery regarding the errors in judgement that baseball scouts used when recruiting.
Then a Nobel prize winning economist commented on his book, saying that it wasn’t a new discovery at all. That led to Lewis researching Daniel Kahneman, who had recently won his own Nobel prize, and going on to write a book about Kahneman’s work, titled The Undoing Project.
They cover a lot of ground in this episode to lay the foundation for how theses biases are consistent and predictable, so they can be exploited. The more data available to pinpoint our behaviors and beliefs, the more specifically we can be targeted without noticing.
Here are the inks I promised in our video:
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is the correct title of the book by Robert Cialdini. (I mis-quoted the title in the video.)
Phishing for Phools is the book by Akerlof and Shiller, two more of the Nobel prize winners interviewed in the PBS video.
The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu, is about how entertainment mediums have monetized our attention since the 1800’s.
Finally, here is the PBS episode to watch: