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A review by sam8834
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
3.0
I'm not big on pop-social-psychology, but I was first drawn to Montell because she's a linguist. And Cultish blended the conception of weird pop culture phenomena (cults) with a discussion on the language that ties them together and reminds us of the persuasiveness of words. This book is less fully realized, imo. It doesn't want to decide if it's socio-cultural commentary or memoir or researched psychological findings, which is fine, but there wasn't any real thesis pulling it all together. How, for example, is all this overthinking affecting us? For better? Worse?
Where Cultish was fun and informative, the follow-up seems more like a primer on some very basic psychological ideas. Sunk cost fallacy, recency illusion, the halo effect...I think the average person understands these concepts, so now what about them? And what do they look like through the lens of a super-interconnected, over-informed society? Montell's humor in this is also very cutesy for my taste, but ymmv.
Probably not a great sign that I read this months ago and forgot to add it here, let alone review it.
Where Cultish was fun and informative, the follow-up seems more like a primer on some very basic psychological ideas. Sunk cost fallacy, recency illusion, the halo effect...I think the average person understands these concepts, so now what about them? And what do they look like through the lens of a super-interconnected, over-informed society? Montell's humor in this is also very cutesy for my taste, but ymmv.
Probably not a great sign that I read this months ago and forgot to add it here, let alone review it.