Worst books

[pj]

Since there usually is not more than one book

a year one wants to shout about so I'll won't specify a year this time.

So far the winner is Liespotting by Pamela Anderson. (ehrm Meyer).

Yes, I am a sucker who thought there is something useful to glean from it.



Apart from the howlers

"The USA economy looses seven GDP percent

annually from deception."

But how much does it gain?



Eckman's lie detection rate is 95%

That one is easy. What is the

sure sign that salesman is lying?

His lips are moving



And. My favourite Dilbertism:



"One way an auditor might suggest combating a Millennial's personal isolationism would be to encourage managers to help each team member to strategize a medium-term career development plan."



The book can be summarized in

two paragraphs, nay, two words.

"People lie".



There is nothing of a substance in there.

Same old trite misconceptions.

Money and time irretrievably lost.



"Allez, circulez, rien à voir ici."

[pj]

Not one, but two.

I mean I have read

Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs, thought WTF?

then forgot and then read

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.

(Fool me twice...)



And these totally crappy books

started me thinking.



Don't we have a case of cognitive

dissonance here? When those books

are positioned as written

by totally average people who are looking for fulfilling one's life,

AND

live near Central Park in Manhattan?



If they were, say, engaging

in some extreme activities and then

writing down their experiences then

it would be interesting.



But all Jacobs dares is

to buy for 49.95$ a board to shit

in crouching position

and to meditate watching the sleep

button of his iMac (he forgot to

mention its price).



Gretchen, herself, is "alas, running pretty close to efficiency"

and then promotes

the singing in the toilet.



That's it.



Being so full of oneself and wanking in

front of the mirror (AKA blogging) is it the disease of late 2010 or what?



And if you (like me) think that there just might be some usable info there, you will

be disappointed, like I was.

[pj]

Guess, who

is the dad-in-law of Gretchen Rubin?

[pj]

And this year winner is Science delusion by Rupert Sheldrake

The title resonates (alas not morphically) with some other title.



I don't recall precisely how I stumbled into this personage.

(Either it was some talk "banned" by TED or unbanned Google talk).



The premise of the book is sort of nice. Those scientists draped

in their ebony towels have lost the sense of reality, and most

importantly, adventure.



They don't see what's happening under their own noses.

And then it pours, the facts that science is unable to explain.

Like that Indian woman (he got her name wrong, but totally)

which substitutes on prana only.

The mathematician with IQ of 126 and virtually no brain.

...



And everything is explainable by morphic fields.



It was entertaining at the beginning, and moreover,

my credo is "know (the face of) thy enemy."



But, but. When the quick Google check amply demonstrates the

shoddiness of his facts (he wasn't able even to get a name

of Stentor roeseli right). When his rants are becoming a bit repetitive.

When he gives a free will to the electrons...



Nah. Avoid.



BTW, the story with the woman feeding on prana. Some bastards

made her vomit, and found some bits of popadum in there.

Bon appétit!

[pj]

There was some masochistic pleasure in reading

Pink's Drive.

But I have decided to stop.

Avoid by all means.

Pop-psychology at it's worst. I should have suspected that

much, when he quoted Maslow.



The summary:

the new century brought

Motivation 3.0

(internal motivation)

Before that there was Motivation 2.0

(factory motivation since nineteenth century, i.e. cash incentives]

And before that

Motivation 1.0 (animal instincts, i.e. sex).



Thus all the creations of the past (books, drawings, games)

are only illusions.

Since the Drive book wasn't written yet.

And thus the internal motivation couldn't happen.





The advice peddled is stolen from the immortal

Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook

---

You might be tempted to try to keep employees satisfied in order to

maintain productivity. That's not easy. Employee satisfaction can be

expensive, sometimes even unhygienic. There is only one germ-free

and economical alternative to addressing the employee satisfaction

issue. See if you can locate it on this list:



EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION ALTERNATIVES

1. Increase salaries.

2. Improve the working environment.

3. Do an employee satisfaction survey and ignore the results.



Choice 3 is the correct answer. But be careful how you design the

employee satisfaction survey. If you allow the employees to say

what's really bothering them, they might expect you to change

something; i.e., expect you to do work, and that would pretty much

hose all the benefits of this approach.

...

If your employees are fixated on selfish short-term goals such as food,

shelter, and happiness, that is exactly the time when skilful manage-

ment is most needed. Your challenge is to convince the employees to

focus on long-term goals, such as their manager's career.

---



I do like the gang of Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Mark Twain, etc.

But, I prefer to read their books by far.

[AndyM]

Why??! What possessed you?

[pj]

I was driven by the curiosity.

[pj]

Hacking For Beginners – Manthan Desai



The guy knows even less than I do.

And tries to promote himself, his site, Vishnu

and himself.



Most of the stuff there is about Windows XP.

(The book is written in 2010)



One of the most daring stuff was to rename

crap.exe to rose.jpg.

Well, a turd by any other name will stink just as bad.

Avoid.

[Cheng]

Didn't you read the Amazon reviews ? Or is it some kind of masochistic pleasure that drives you to wade through this stuff Evil Grin ?

[pj]

Is that shit sold on Amazon? I found it through quite a circuitous route.

Didn't bother to check it's presence there.



> Or is it some kind of masochistic pleasure that drives you to wade through this stuff



There is a bit of that, true.

But the Amazon reviews aren't extremely informative either. No, sahib.



I can't say that this thread is often updated.