The Myth of Experience

Why We Learn the Wrong Lessons, and Ways to Correct Them

By: Emre Soyer, Robin M Hogarth

Narrated by: Greg Baglia

Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Experience is a great teacher...except when it isn't.

In this groundbreaking guide, learn how the past can deceive and limit us - and how healthy skepticism can build a better world.

Our personal experience is key to who we are and what we do. We judge others by their experience and are judged by ours. Society venerates experience. From doctors to teachers to managers to presidents, the more experience the better. It's not surprising then, that we often fall back on experience when making decisions, an easy way to make judgements about the future, a constant teacher that provides clear lessons. Yet, this intuitive reliance on experience is misplaced.

In The Myth of Experience, behavioral scientists Emre Soyer and Robin Hogarth take a transformative look at experience and the many ways it deceives and misleads us. From distorting the past to limiting creativity to reducing happiness, experience can cause misperceptions and then reinforce them without our awareness. Instead, the authors argue for a nuanced approach, where a healthy skepticism toward the lessons of experience results in more reliable decisions and sustainable growth.

Soyer and Hogarth illustrate the flaws of experience - with real-life examples from bloodletting to personal computers to pandemics - and distill cutting-edge research as a guide to decision-making, as well as provide the remedies needed to improve our judgments and choices in the workplace and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Emre Soyer and Robin M Hogarth (P)2020 PublicAffairs

Intriguing and Relevant

Well narrated. I liked the book. I have read several of the books referenced as well.

A poor summary of other, better books

To get the core experience of this book, go read Thinking: Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational while at an environmentalist protest standing next to the person with a megaphone.

The information here isn't usually wrong, per se, but the author has a tendency go dive into long winded hypotheticals, and they often overlook complex situations in favor of simply waving their hands and saying "experience is bad!", ignoring mechanical, structural, etc. problems and limitations.

The book also has extremely poor pacing- it wanders across the gambit of the various meanings of the word "experience", starting with why past experience is sometimes helpful (See Thinking: Fast and Slow's section on wicked learning environments for worthwhile reading there), then rambles off to talk about how your current day to day experience is bad (Predictably Irrational does a better job covering this), and regularly repeats in vague terms environmental information we all already know.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. It won't convince those who don't already agree, and provides no new insights or information to those that do.