Rating

★★★★☆

Category

non-fiction

Read

2011-05-24

Pages

304

Plenty of research and inteviews, easy to read. I couldn’t help but feel something was missing though … maybe some reasoning wasn’t as robust as I would like. Somewhat of a depressing book, for instance: - Scientists infiltrated a cult preaching the end of the world, when the world didn’t end (i.e. explicit falsification) their belief was stronger than before. - Residents of Libby were all given cancer by the local asbestos mine, which the owning company new about, but even after it was exposed residents still steadfastly believed nothing was wrong, even as they were on oxygen tanks. - Volunteers filling out a form in a room by themselves sounded the alarm when smoke started filling the room. They didn’t when there were two or more people in the room with them.

A good takeaway was the need to “institutionalize dissent” in organisations. Everyone in the industry knew about the sub-prime crisis and other banking fraud in the US, but no one said anything, and if they did they were ignored or dismissed (SEC not investigating Madoff, for instance)