Learn From Mistakes

This book is a strange kind of self-help. Instead of bullet-point takeaways, he grinds you with stories. The narratives are centered on the idea "to learn from mistakes" and its interplay with our various cognitive biases. I admit the story was a little heavy duty which involves a death from medical procedure to a large plane accident. That makes the book intro very gripping.

Matthew brings an application of the concept laid out in Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow. The author's background as a political science major brings more social science/organizational twist to that conventional psychology.

I find it interesting there were strucutral differences in attitudes towards at the level of industry (airliners/startups learn, hospitals/judges don't). Each story was entertaining. He touched on concept I knew before such as A/B testing in engineering and placebo control from medical experiments. He demonstrates them as a way we can learn from our mistakes. He also talks about local minimal and global maxima (AI/startup concept).

The book overall is intelligent and I could tell Matthew is a very smart guy who reads a lot. It was not that original however. Also his concept is hard to apply in our everyday life. For example, what should you do knowing surgeons do not learn from their mistakes? Not to go to the hospitals? Unless you are a policymaker or at a high-level managerial position, learning from mistakes doesn't bring home a message.  The book would have been better if it stuck to one or two of those industries instead of trying to discover universal concepts. I'll probably forget about this book in a few months, unfortunately.