Book roundup, August 2018

Thriller-like plot, 10 billion dollars on the line, and twisted romantic relationship, this sounds like what a movie is made of. WSJ’s John Carreyrou’s new book, Bad Blood, walks us through the real-life story of the once Silicon Valley’s hottest startup Theranos, through its rise, its mythical technology, and its final downfall. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes promises the world a revolutionary healthcare product to the world, a device that can perform most if not all the blood tests, just based on few drops of blood pricked from the finger. She sold this idea, through her vivid personal experience of “fear of needles”, to investors, making her company to valued at almost 10 billion dollars in the peak. However, the company is built on lies: there is just no such magical devices, the “fake it till you make it” culture that Silicon Valley cultivated only made matter worse. The lack of rigorous scientific practice is shocking, even for big companies like Walgreen and Safeway, who lost millions due to their partnership with Theranos. Although I’ve been following this subject closely as it unfolds, I found myself very engaged throughout.

People are interesting subjects, not the least to these two fellows. In undoing project, Michael Lewis walks us through the lives of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, how these two disrupt the field of economics, by challenging one of its foundations, that people will behave rationally. No we don’t, such as in the case of conjunction fallacy, hindsight bias, and the worst of all, let our herustic override rational thinking in decision makings. As noted in the book: Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. Listening through this book help me to stay clear of these mistakes, at least make me more aware of them.

In between these two books, I quickly glanced over the naked statistics again. This is the first book I listened through audible, revisiting it again at this juncture makes many of the statistic concepts and examples more concrete, to the point I actually bought a hard-copy of the book. Good stuff.