The Hidden Half: The Unseen Forces that Influence Everything

by Michael Blastland

Overview

Why does one smoker die of lung cancer but another live to 100? The answer is "The Hidden Half"—those random, unknowable variables that mess up our attempts to comprehend the world. We humans are very clever creatures—but we're idiots about how clever we really are. This entertaining and ingenious book reveals how in our quest to make the world more understandable, we lose sight of how unexplainable it often is. The result—from GDP figures to medicine—is that experts know a lot less than they think. Filled with compelling stories from economics, genetics, business, and science, The Hidden Half is a warning that an explanation which works in one arena may not work in another. Entertaining and provocative, it will change how you view the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786496393
Publisher:	Atlantic Books
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	45,939
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michael Blastland is a writer and broadcaster. He is the author of The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, and the coauthor of The Norm Chronicles.

Table of Contents

Prologue The marmorkrebs and the hidden half 1

1 Bill is not Ben

Hidden influences on the path through life 22

2 I am not constant

Unsuspected causes of belief and choice 60

3 Here is not there, now is not then

Obscure differences that subvert knowledge 78

4 One path is not enough

What 'finding out' through research doesn't see 113

5 The principle isn't practical

Big ideas and the small print 143

6 Big is not small

The hidden limits of what's probable 163

7 Big is not clear

Hidden complexity in simple stories 187

8 The ignorant chicken

On ignoring the hidden half 205

9 What to do 228

Postscript Why the hidden half? 250

Acknowledgements 253

Endnotes 255

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

08/24/2020

British radio broadcaster Blastland (The Norm Chronicles) takes a wide-ranging look at the limitations to the human ability to understand the world through data. Challenging received wisdom across a broad swath of disciplines, he begins with biology, focusing on marmorkrebs, a recently discovered variety of crayfish who can reproduce asexually, via unfertilized embryo. The scientific assumption is that these animals’ offspring, if all raised under the same conditions, would be identical to each other, but that has not proved the case. Nature and nurture have their say, Blastland contends, but there is another, as yet unknown, group of factors with equal sway. Elsewhere, he observes that “nearly 90% of... peer-reviewed findings did not appear to stand up” and that “maybe 40% of continuing medical procedures are either useless or positively do harm.” Venturing outside the realm of science and medicine, Blastland comments on how few professional economists or political analysts accurately predicted, respectively, China’s post–Tiananmen Square rise or Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. Calling for “uncertainty... to be reclaimed from the cynical to become a weapon of the responsible,” this excellent work makes a convincing appeal for intellectual humility in the face of the unknowable. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Elegantly written and mind-expanding . . . will enthrall you with its storytelling while educating you with its scientific depth." —Daniel H. Pink, author, Drive


"Fascinating and provocative. Blastland is one of the most original thinkers around." —Tim Harford, author, The Undercover Economist


"Skeptics will be sure of even less after reading Blastland's book–and that's a step in the right direction." —Kirkus Reviews


"Blastland would like us to embrace ‘how ingeniously the world creates difference,’ and to treat such abstractions as a potentially positive force in our understanding of science, economics, policymaking, and business. We’d be wise to listen." —Foreword Reviews


"This excellent work makes a convincing appeal for intellectual humility in the face of the unknowable." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2020-07-16
We know a fraction of what we think we know—and, writes journalist Blastland, even that is likely to be wrong.

This is a book-length exercise in what philosophers call epistemic humility, which the author, co-author of The Norm Chronicles, a study of risk, glosses as “intellectual humble pie to the rest of us.” If clones are supposed to be identical copies of some master unit, how is it that marmorkrebs, or cloned crayfish, vary markedly in size and other qualities when they’re “identical batch-mates in the same conditions”? If economists are so smart, why couldn’t we avoid the worldwide 2008 financial collapse? Why is it that a gaggle of juvenile delinquents, studied over a long period, deep into adulthood, diverged into repeat offenders and model citizens, given the same backgrounds and disadvantages, and that identical twins can be so downright different? Blastland’s answers are considered and developed at leisure, but in the end, they boil down to the proposition that although we are wedded to ideas of order and regular patterns, the world is chaotic. Acknowledging this, he continues, allows us to see chance, noise, and like things that rationalists detest as instead “a positive force for disruption.” That positivity doesn’t help us avert what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a black-swan event, but it does go a long way toward explaining oddities of human behavior. In one experiment, Blastland elicited political opinions from a group of volunteers, then wrote down the opposite of what the respondents said, only to have them passionately and rationally defend the viewpoint exactly counter to their own. We believe what we want to, it seems. Chaos and contingency also help explain the rise of Donald Trump and the success of the Brexit movement, neither of which should ever have happened. The author closes with a dozen useful pointers for navigating uncertainty, including the mandate, “Don’t use probability to disguise ignorance.”

Skeptics will be sure of even less after reading Blastland’s book—and that’s a step in the right direction.

Kirkus Reviews