.
While reading the book and after, I could not quite decide if I liked it.
I've always liked the "elephants in the cloud" thought ( that human beings are wired to find a purpose and meaning to everything, to find patterns in the chaos that surrounds us) and the author has explained the idea very well in his field of risk analysis and has been able to extrapolate them it to life in general, in his random thoughts. I learnt a lot of new things from the book and I liked the book for that.
However, I believe that it could have been written a little better than this. It was more like a compilation of scattered thoughts and examples which I could not quite classify as a writing style. I really didn't see any reason why the things in a particular chapter were consolidated to be in that chapter. They might as well have been in another section. I am not sure if there was something huge in the book which I totally missed due to which I missed that connection and order. To conclude, the things he talked about have not found their way into a single sector in my mind.
Now, that may be because of my ignorance in the area of probability, I might have had to spend some extra effort on it which might have spoilt my ability to appreciate the writing style, if there is one :). This opinion is likely to change if I attempt to read it a second time.
It is a lot like Outliers, Tipping Point, Freakonomics and the likes and I find the social behavioral economics /psychology and the cognitive bias studies and game theory experiments very interesting. So, the book kept me interested. In short, good read.
PS: I am again trying to find patterns when I wonder if there was any reason why I picked up this book soon after completing The God Delusion. It was more like this idea keeps coming in the books I pick up to read:).
That leads me, yet another time, to the 'cause-effect theory' which has always been playing in my head for quite a long time. More about that later.
While reading the book and after, I could not quite decide if I liked it.
I've always liked the "elephants in the cloud" thought ( that human beings are wired to find a purpose and meaning to everything, to find patterns in the chaos that surrounds us) and the author has explained the idea very well in his field of risk analysis and has been able to extrapolate them it to life in general, in his random thoughts. I learnt a lot of new things from the book and I liked the book for that.
However, I believe that it could have been written a little better than this. It was more like a compilation of scattered thoughts and examples which I could not quite classify as a writing style. I really didn't see any reason why the things in a particular chapter were consolidated to be in that chapter. They might as well have been in another section. I am not sure if there was something huge in the book which I totally missed due to which I missed that connection and order. To conclude, the things he talked about have not found their way into a single sector in my mind.
Now, that may be because of my ignorance in the area of probability, I might have had to spend some extra effort on it which might have spoilt my ability to appreciate the writing style, if there is one :). This opinion is likely to change if I attempt to read it a second time.
It is a lot like Outliers, Tipping Point, Freakonomics and the likes and I find the social behavioral economics /psychology and the cognitive bias studies and game theory experiments very interesting. So, the book kept me interested. In short, good read.
PS: I am again trying to find patterns when I wonder if there was any reason why I picked up this book soon after completing The God Delusion. It was more like this idea keeps coming in the books I pick up to read:).
That leads me, yet another time, to the 'cause-effect theory' which has always been playing in my head for quite a long time. More about that later.
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