Customer Reviews

Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely (High Reliability and Crisis Management)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Regardless of your political leanings, this is a must-read book for anyone who cares about clear-headed thinking and the ploys that are used to trick us into solving the wrong problems. When "solving the wrong problem" is done unintentionally, the authors refer to this as a Type III error; when it is intentional, they refer to this as a Type IV error.

In essence the book is about qualitative analysis involving high-stakes situations, though the authors don't refer to it as such. It speaks to the logic that is involved (or should be involved) in properly framing and characterizing complex societal problems ... long before the statistician starts crunching numbers. I highly recommend the book to policy makers, decision makers, aspiring statisticians, or anyone, for that matter, who wants to recognize when and how they are being manipulated by politicians, the media, advertisers, think tanks, SIGs, etc. Also, as one who instructs and consults project managers, I believe PMs would benefit from recognizing that many of the requirements-related problems they encounter are essentially Type III errors.

But make no mistake, the authors go after some sacred cows: politics (especially right-of-center politics), the health insurance industry, religion, science, and education. So, you may need to check your sensitivities at the door if you wish to read the book with an open mind.

These are two powerhouse authors: Mitroff is one of the great figures of 20th Century organization behavior. He is Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Abraham Silvers was Associate Professor of Statistics at the Baylor College of Medicine and now provides environmental statistical consulting services.
An interdisciplinary perspective pervades in this book.
If you purchase this book, be aware you are really buying two books. And the title gives away the problem as you will see in this review.
One book is superb.
The superb book is called HOW WE TRICK OURSELVES AND OTHERS INTO SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEMS PRECISELY. The authors make the case that statistics only looks at Type 1 and Type 2 Errors. Type 1 Errors mean that the decision makers conclude that there is a meaningful difference when there is not. In other words, affirmatively getting the wrong answer. Type 2 Errors mean that decision makers conclude there is not a meaningful difference when there is. In other words, a failure to get it right.
Any leader will have at least an hour worth of Type 1 and Type 2 horror stories. We have all been victims. And we have all been perpetuators.
The authors then introduce a Type 3 Error: precisely solving the wrong problem.
This is a helpful perspective and a valuable one for Boards when they review strategy submitted by the CEO. Instead of asking, "Will it work?"Why not start with "are we looking at the right problem in the first place?"
Because Type 3 errors are part of the human condition, organizations can set up checks and balances to deal with it. For example, at the Board Level, meaningful Board of Director Self Evaluation does help the Board be aware of when its own group dynamics might cause it to logically and correctly solve the wrong problem.
We are all imperfect creatures and are prone to Type 3 Errors.
Ah, but then there is that second book.
It begins with the discussion of Type Four Errors: deliberate manipulation of data to cause leaders to solve the wrong problem precisely. They say it is due to "self-righteousness, overzealousness, malice, and narrow ideology." In other words, dirty rotten scoundrels contribute to DIRTY ROTTEN STRATEGIES.
This second book clearly is driven by the authors' own ideology and lack of historical perspective. They are out of their league. There is nothing new in Type 4 errors except the commonsense notion that people do manipulate information to suit their advantage. Is that news?
This second book has vitriol but lacks depth or practical solutions.
I want to emphasize that the first book is admirable. Too bad you can't buy one without getting the other.

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Larry Stybel.
Boardoptions.com

This book starts off strong by pointing out how organizations and people make key errors in logic - he does a good job of defining what these are and how they affect each of us in daily decision making. Well done... but, it digresses rapidly as the author begins using lame extreme left-wing examples to badger right-wing'ers on how conservatives are fundamentally poor decision makers. The title of the book should be "conservatives are stupid and I'm going to show you why". He lost it his authoring and educational authority once he went into this "mode" and it's unfortunate because he could have produced a solid book on logic that could have been very helpful. Back to titles, the tag line "Dirty Rotten Strategies" really alludes to nothing on what the book is about other than blaming conservatives for all the ill will in the world and all their mean "rotten strategies" - thus the title. I had to think about it for a while.. why this title and it's clear after reading the book and the author's purpose.

Unfortunately this author is so blind to his own extreme left-wing conspiracy theories that he stumbles over his own logic and makes you wonder if he even knows how flawed he looks in his own writings. He would have had a decent book if he kept his examples to "neutral" business cases which would have been brilliant in clarify his main points - at least it would not have antagonized or alienated some of his readers. I really think this book was laid out to bash right-winger's otherwise read his concepts and filter out the "bad conservatives" message and you might get the points that make sense and can be helpful with anyone who has an honest desire to learn about errors in logic and how to become better people for it.

Drs. Mitroff and Silvers embarked on a journey to explain much about why and how we tend to be so bad at problem definition; ergo, solving.

Two succinct points are the following:
o People tend to cling very hard to what they already believe or practice.
o People really do not want to deal with reality.

To a very scholarly style, they drop in a number of pithy quotes that I liked:

o Jonathon Swift, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
o Alexis De Tocqueville where he said, "It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth."

My last comment is to those who wrote reviews and seem disturbed by the authors' political biases. They made no mystery of their personal bent from the beginning, so what did you expect? They weren't trying to fool anyone like many of the cases they used.

Things I liked or thought were well said: the preface, the Armstrong-religion paragraph, the bullet holes story, and others. Things I did not like or thought were not done very well: the analysis of Coca-Cola, the oversimplification of Type Two errors, the roundabout definition of Type Three errors. There are insightful thoughts here and there, but they seem rather too sparse for my taste. I stopped reading after the first two chapters, so maybe it gets better from chapter 3.

This book is good for people who are beginning to realize that there is more to reality than the one touted by governments, public schools, naive adults, and corporations. This book is not for people who can detect "straw man" arguments. This book is also not for people who think too much and spend too much time writing reviews of books.

Based on the commercial reviews and publisher's description, I had hoped to learn something about logical thinking and decision making. Instead, I found this book to be a progressive, liberal diatribe against recent national political decisions with which the author disagreed. After setting up a logical and linguistic structure for describing the process of wrong-thinking, the book descends into biased assertions and high-sounding name calling. I admit to being in general more politically conservative than the author, but also disagreeing with some of the decisions and actions of the recent Republican national leadership. Even when I disagreed with those decisions, and in effect agreed with the author of the wrongness of decisions, i found this book's attacks on the topics illogical, biased, and insulting to my intelligence. I paid for this book, thinking it would be a valuable component of my library. I wasted my money. If you feel you must read it (which I see no value in doing) borrow it, do not spend money on it.

This book addresses a fascinating topic of how it is, both as individuals and societies, that we go off solving the wrong problem or solving problems incorrectly. It is clear from the broad range of examples they give that they have put considerable effort into studying the issue and reaching their conclusions.

However reading thru it I found the writing stiff and tedious. Moreover they seem to take polemic stands that seem unwarranted. I stopped reading the book when I got to the following: "The inside of shopping malls is so carefully controlled and staged that it looks and feels like outside, and such outside places as theme parks, for example, look and feel like inside. As a result the concepts 'outside' and 'inside' don't mean anything anymore." At which point I decided I had better uses for my time...

In view of the authors' credentials and experience, this book is quite poorly written. It is full of weakly documented assertions - most of which I agree with, but not owing to their logic or evidence. The writing is exceedingly repetitive. And it's laced with numerous irritatingly sophomoric phrases like: "Their views of the world - that is, their worldviews - ..." It would seem that the Stanford Business Books series does not employ professional editors.

The idea that we often tackle the wrong problem and the few insights into why this is the case are valuable offerings. The overly grandiose dubbing of this notion as a Type 3 (and Type 4) error gets to be a bit much, especially after reading "Type 3 error" a few hundred times. In general, this is a book that richly deserves to be a 10-page article.

I saw a CSPAN broadcast of Mitroff's talk to the Commonwealth Club of California, which was pretty interesting. As a result I thought this would be an interesting read. I was quite wrong. It's more of a polemic. Though I generally agree with the authors political leanings, this book was far too simplistic to hold my interest.

Here's how to save some money. Make a list of every issue you can think of and the Conservative viewpoint for each issue. Then next to each viewpoint write, "Type 4 Error." Learn anything new? Neither did I. There, I saved you the cost of the book. Someone made a Type 4 Error in convincing me to buy this book.

Mitroff and Silvers have a fascinating concept about our propensity (sometimes confused, sometimes purposeful) to ask the wrong questions about complex problems, thereby getting the wrong solutions. The book, however, is poorly written, repetative, repetative, repetative, annoying at times (especially when they come across as angry) and often uses circular arguments, all of which undermine their own insights and make them less convincing. The attempt to scientificize their idea into type III and IV errors (an extension of the classic type I and II errors in statistics) is cute but unnecessary and confusing. Reads like a series of lectures that could have been made into a brief article, not a full book. The authors needed a good editor.