Everything you have heard is wrong
I finally read "Everything Bad Is Good For You" by Steven Johnson.
Of course I am quite familiar with the premise and arguments of the
book, since it would have been hard to miss them during the last year
or so when you read the things that I otherwise read. However, the name
of this book is a horrendous stretch at best, since the book simply
argues that popular television shows and video games keep getting
cognitively more demanding, and this trains people's minds and makes
them more intelligent. And that's it. This is what every single page of
the book is about. It is hard to argue against this observation, but
the title "everything bad is good for you" simply doesn't make any
sense at all to summarize the content of this book. And besides, in our
present-day world, where exactly are "Seinfeld" and "The Sopranos"
widely considered to be "bad" or "garbage", in either the mainstream
culture or the intellectual circles?
I have felt a similar disconnect with a book's title and its actual content a couple of times before, when the title has obviously come from the marketing department of the publisher to make the book more catchy for the audience. For example, "The Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as It Gets" by Joseph Heath. This totally excellent book examines which things should be left for free market and which should not, and makes its case in general terms. I was quite impressed by the book and it is one of my favourites of all time. But I guess that after the writer submitted it to the publisher, they suggested that he should add some Canadian content to justify their catchier title. This is obvious from the fact that the content that proves that the Canadian way is good is so obviously separate from the main content of the book.
Another book in which the main disconnect was between the book itself and what I have seen said about it elsewhere was "The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz. Every time that I have seen this book mentioned in the blogosphere, it has always been about the book's famous argument that increased choices can make people worse off. For example, additional options can make them wonder "What if I had chosen otherwise?" afterwards and ruin their enjoyment of the choice that they actually made. Economists typically like to reject this argument and argue that more choices is always better, so that is what this book is known for. However, only the first few chapters in this book are about this negative effect of increased choices at all. The remaining chapters, which comprise the main bulk of the book's body, examine completely different topics about decision theory and its psychology in an enjoyable and readable fashion. These topics are in style of "If two men take a taxi to the airport where their separate flights are supposed to leave at the same time, and the first man is 30 minutes late while the second man is only five minutes late since his flight was delayed 25 minutes, why is the second man a lot more annoyed?" and as far as I can tell, have absolutely nothing to do with the "paradox of choice".
I have felt a similar disconnect with a book's title and its actual content a couple of times before, when the title has obviously come from the marketing department of the publisher to make the book more catchy for the audience. For example, "The Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as It Gets" by Joseph Heath. This totally excellent book examines which things should be left for free market and which should not, and makes its case in general terms. I was quite impressed by the book and it is one of my favourites of all time. But I guess that after the writer submitted it to the publisher, they suggested that he should add some Canadian content to justify their catchier title. This is obvious from the fact that the content that proves that the Canadian way is good is so obviously separate from the main content of the book.
Another book in which the main disconnect was between the book itself and what I have seen said about it elsewhere was "The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz. Every time that I have seen this book mentioned in the blogosphere, it has always been about the book's famous argument that increased choices can make people worse off. For example, additional options can make them wonder "What if I had chosen otherwise?" afterwards and ruin their enjoyment of the choice that they actually made. Economists typically like to reject this argument and argue that more choices is always better, so that is what this book is known for. However, only the first few chapters in this book are about this negative effect of increased choices at all. The remaining chapters, which comprise the main bulk of the book's body, examine completely different topics about decision theory and its psychology in an enjoyable and readable fashion. These topics are in style of "If two men take a taxi to the airport where their separate flights are supposed to leave at the same time, and the first man is 30 minutes late while the second man is only five minutes late since his flight was delayed 25 minutes, why is the second man a lot more annoyed?" and as far as I can tell, have absolutely nothing to do with the "paradox of choice".
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