Eyes Wide Open
How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World is Noreena Hertz’s practical, cutting-edge guide to help you cut through the data deluge and make smarter and better choices, based on her highly popular TED talk.
In this eye-opening handbook, the internationally noted speaker, economics expert, and bestselling author of IOU: The Debt Threat and Silent Takeover reveals the extent to which the biggest decisions in our lives are often made on the basis of flawed information, weak assumptions, corrupted data, insufficient scrutiny of others, and a lack of self-knowledge.
To avert such disasters, Hertz persuasively argues, we need to become empowered decision-makers, capable of making high-stakes choices and holding accountable those who advise us.
In Eyes Wide Open, she weaves together scientific research with real-world examples from Hollywood to Harry Potter, NASA to World War Two spies, to construct a path to more astute and empowered decision-making in ten clear steps. With a razor-sharp intellect and an instinct for popular storytelling, she offers counter-intuitive, actionable guidance for making better choices—whether you are a business-person, a professional, a patient, or a parent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economist Hertz (The Silent Takeover) provides a detailed guide to the vulnerabilities of human cognition, ranging from selection biases to sleep deprivation, from statistical misapprehensions to simple peer pressure and unconscious environmental cues. She also explains how the straightforward presentation of information can sometimes mislead us, and the means by which profit- and power-seeking entities attempt to exploit our human foibles. Each of the book's 10 sections includes advice on how to address these pitfalls and methods by which distracting influences and misleading data can filtered by the self-aware to arrive at reasonable decisions. Written in an informal style, the book might seem like light entertainment, but many of Hertz's observations are impressively incisive. Readers interested in more information are well advised to peruse the author's detailed end notes. Properly applied, her straightforward suggestions will alert readers to logical and perceptive blinders, allowing them to make better decisions.
