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New York Times Best Seller Business Book

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Re: New York Times Best Seller Business Book

#2

Post by mercwear »

If you are attempting to follow the advice of business books verbatim that could be the problem.

Most / all of the good ones I have read tell one view of what led to success. I take what I learn and attempt to apply it to my own schools of thought and with any luck come out of the exercise with a more well rounded opinion than I went in with.

Your post seems to advocate for peer reviews in business books as well, don’t you think that unbiased reviews from readers fill that need?

Re: New York Times Best Seller Business Book

#3

Post by dubeyaayush07 »

mercwear wrote: post #2

If you are attempting to follow the advice of business books verbatim that could be the problem. Most / all of the good ones I have read tell one view of what led to success. I take what I learn and attempt to apply it to my own schools of thought and with any luck come out of the exercise with a more well rounded opinion than I went in with. Your post seems to advocate for peer reviews in business books as well, don…

It was just an off-hand joke and readers are not peers in the sense they are the people who are not familiar with the content of the book.

Re: New York Times Best Seller Business Book

#4

Post by lallysingh »

mercwear wrote: post #2

If you are attempting to follow the advice of business books verbatim that could be the problem. Most / all of the good ones I have read tell one view of what led to success. I take what I learn and attempt to apply it to my own schools of thought and with any luck come out of the exercise with a more well rounded opinion than I went in with. Your post seems to advocate for peer reviews in business books as well, don…

I think there's pipeline of Harvard Business Review (and similar) articles to the book shelf, and it has to stop. The article has the meat, and then it's repeated/filled/fluffed into a book.

There are services that trim them back.

Re: New York Times Best Seller Business Book

#6

Post by tensor »

mercwear wrote: post #2

If you are attempting to follow the advice of business books verbatim that could be the problem. Most / all of the good ones I have read tell one view of what led to success. I take what I learn and attempt to apply it to my own schools of thought and with any luck come out of the exercise with a more well rounded opinion than I went in with. Your post seems to advocate for peer reviews in business books as well, don…

Reader reviews are absolutely unable to determine most of the things the author points out. I generally don't read business books because my "school of thought" is that "science works for gaining understanding, nothing else does."

The author of this joke piece is pretty spot on in terms of the non-scientific mistakes these books almost always make. E.g. correlation != causation, anecdotes != data and so on.

Re: New York Times Best Seller Business Book

#8

Post by schuetze »

If you are reading popular books on social science (which many business books are), it is very likely that the author is pushing research they are personally invested in succeeding. They are often not trying to convey a nuanced understanding of a phenomenon. Furthermore, popular books are often not peer-reviewed to the same extant or at all as regular research literature.

A better alternative is to read review articles in journals. They are shorter than books and will also give a more reasonable estimate of the certainty experts have in a certain field of results. For example, in psychology there is the Annual Review of Psychology, which generally publishes ~50pg readable summaries of literature by experts in the field. For the love of social science, please stop reading popular books on the brain/mind.

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