The Hidden Half
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The Hidden Half
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Narrated by:
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Kris Dyer
About this listen
Why does one smoker die of lung cancer but another live to 100? The answer is 'The Hidden Half' - those random, unknowable variables that mess up our attempts to comprehend the world. We humans are very clever creatures - but we're idiots about how clever we really are. In this entertaining and ingenious book, Blastland reveals how in our quest to make the world more understandable, we lose sight of how unexplainable it often is. The result - from GDP figures to medicine - is that experts know a lot less than they think. Filled with compelling stories from economics, genetics, business, and science, The Hidden Half is a warning that an explanation which works in one arena may not work in another.
Entertaining and provocative, it will change how you view the world.
©2019 Michael Blastland (P)2019 W. F. Howes LtdListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"Highly original and challenging... Once you have read this book, you can't unread it." (Daniel Finkelstein, The Times)
"Fascinating and provocative. Blastland is one of the most original thinkers around." (Tim Harford, Financial Times columnist and author of The Undercover Economist)
"Elegantly written and mind-expanding, The Hidden Half will enthrall you with its storytelling while educating you with its scientific depth." (Daniel H. Pink, best-selling author of Drive)
What listeners say about The Hidden Half
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- J. Drew
- 31-10-21
Fascinating book
Wow, what a book. This book begins with the quote “it ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so“ which is possibly by Mark Twain. The book talks about a new species of crayfish known as the marmorkrebs, similar to other crayfish apart from the fact that loan females collate and hatch eggs without fertilisation. Therefore the young marmorkrebs are genetically the same and when raised in exactly the same lab controlled environment where they have access to the same food and all they want and are regularly checked for disease, they should in theory all be exactly the same. However, when the same genes were raised in the same environment something odd happened, every single one had a unique pattern of marbled markings and had physical differences in their sensory organs, internal organs, how they moved and rested, different life spans ranging from 437 to 910 days. The onset of reproduction was different as was the quantity of the eggs and the number of batches. Same genetic coding, same environment and yet all were different. There was something else, a hidden something, that made them different. What was the cause? We might wonder about genes or environment, or nature and nurture, but what are other factors that make us all different and what is the impact upon research papers which tries to control all variables. We need to accept the possibility that the big influences are not as orderly or as consistent as we expect and that the way things turn out is not necessarily bound by observable laws or common factors, but also by massive uncommon factors. This book explores three arguments. The first is that we need to face up more readily to the many mysteries and surprises about how human understanding works. We need to accept that we know less than we think we know. The second idea is to put aside questions of rationality and dig into the hidden half of enigmatic variation instead of the positive force of disruption. We dream of laws and general truth when the practicality is often a patchwork of unexpected anomalies. The third idea is how do we cope in a world where we know less than we think and that the world falls into lines less readily than we suppose. To accept that we live in houses of straw rather than in houses of brick.
There is a story that I love about a father who was a criminal, neglected his two sons, gambled and was an alcoholic and ended up in jail. He had two children, one was respectable, married, and a good career and was of a good nature. The second son was exactly like the father. Both sons, when asked separately by a psychiatrist why they had ended up that way, both said “with a father like mine, what do you expect?“ We can use narratives to explain cause-and-effect, but are these true? Mike Tyson, the boxer, was brought up in serial homes in condemned buildings with a heavy drinking mother who could be violent, took cocaine when he was 11 and had been arrested 38 times when he was 13. He finished up in a correctional institution for boys in New York's most infamous juvenile prison. Is it any wonder that Mike Tyson became a self-styled bad man, bit off another boxers ear and ended up in prison for rape. With an upbringing like that how else was he due to turn out. However, the anomaly of this story is that Mike Tyson had a brother, Rodney Tyson, who was also raised in a similar situation to his brother. Yet he became a specialist surgical assistant in a hospital trauma department in Los Angeles where he also helped patch up the victims of crime. Same background yet both brothers became so different. One was a violent and angry man and one had a vocation to help. Similar backgrounds yet one ended up in prison and the other brother ended up with empathy and compassion. Does the narrative predict and the stories we tell ourselves predict how everything will end up. The author talked about a research paper called ‘shared beginnings, divergent lies: delinquent boys to age 70’. Two researchers followed up a study of 500 men who have been in serious trouble in childhood and another 500 who despite similar backgrounds had not. They tracked down as many of the men in the original study and the one thing they found was that everybody brought up in a similar environment had ended up with very different lives and careers. Some remained antisocial but many led appropriate and good lives.
When we look at studies of twins, both identical and those who are born conjoined, we know that even these babies and children grow up to have very strikingly different aspects of personality. The effects of your environment including your parents do not seem to have as much of an influence as we believe on how we behave. There would appear to be chancing counters which can dramatically impact and change events in your life and how you end up, it might be a cough that causes cancer or a chance encounter that changes your life. If you consider that 50% of our personality is mainly shaped by genetics, there is 50% that we don’t know. But even when we look at ourselves we are not symmetrical. Draw a line between our face, one side will be slightly different to the other. A woman who gets breast cancer in one breast, will not necessarily get cancer in the other breast (it is almost similar to a woman who has never had breast cancer). In women over the age of 50 it’s 13% as opposed to with a lifetime risk of breast cancer overall is 12%. There is an interesting experiment described in the book where people were made to decide choices, for example when asked which of several girls in pictures they fancied, when later pictures were switched and they were told that they had said they fancied a different girl, they were then asked to explain the reason why even when they weren’t aware that they had been given a different choice. They would tell themselves a story or confabulate (to find a plausible answer to why we behaved in a certain way) something to explain their reasoning, even when it wasn’t correct.
We often have conflict free and inconsistent belief systems, even when we have thought about them. The world is often too complex and difficult to understand so once we form a belief about a story that we’ve told ourselves, we can be very resistant to any change in that story. We create frameworks and stories to explain things which aren’t necessarily true or correct. If you ask researchers to find out the answer to a simple question such as how many red cards might be given to 2 pairs of people of different colours to determine if referees are racist, you will come up with a wide variation of approaches that lead to a wide array of different answers. The greatest obstacle to learning more understanding isn’t necessarily the wisdom behind it but what we think is so and all the stories we tell ourselves rather than the truth.
There is an interesting story about a chicken and a farmer. The chicken is fed by the farmer every day and the farmer comes to feed the chicken which comes to eat the food. One day the farmer comes along just before December and rings the chickens neck. Just because you think something is going to happen doesn’t mean to say it’s always going to happen in the same way. As Bertrand Russell once said “the mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again“. We should remain uncertain about everything we believe. We often look for a silver bullet to explain everything but often a range of complexities such as why teenage pregnancies have dropped or how schools can work more effectively in making children’s learning more effective. Sometimes there will be a mirrared of reasons and looking for one simple reason to explain cause-and-effect can become our downfall. If you want to have a laugh, just look at all the predictions that people make that are often wrong. Everyone thought China was going to remain a poor country, no one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism. People can have genetic mutations which means some people can’t handle alcohol whilst others can, some people can have an anaphylactic response to nuts but others can just devour them all day long.
The book ends with a number of approaches for things that we can do to help manage uncertainty and complexity and summarised in the quote “Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay fine” by Thomas Pynchon. One of these is to embrace uncertainty. We don’t want to know what day we will die and uncertainty makes life interesting.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- D. RICHARDSON
- 07-12-23
The Story of the Black Swan in everything
A mix of causality, chaos theory, evolution, evidence based epistemology and an explanation of the fragility of science (esp social science in complex environments). A must for any QI enthusiast or just to better understand why life is as it is
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