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smolgalaxybrain's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
1.75
Never have I ever wanted to set a book on fire despite agreeing with many of its theories and principles. It felt like I've read 600 pages instead of 300ish, even though I am used to reading dry non fictions.
TLDR:
1. Misleading title - "How We Change" only pertains to the first 1/3 of the book, and maybe slightly more if yousquint connect the dots between nudging and "excursions" to changing societies by yourself.
2. Badly joined together, works better as three separate books. As he himself said in the preface, "Do not make for a unitary narrative" indeed.
3. Incredibly repetitive, monotonous, and tedious to read through. Uses not just the same examples for different arguments/rebuttals, but the same explanations of why those examples are relevant to the conversation. Regurgitate almost word to word the same theories in different sections. Needless explanations. Dry sentence structures. This is before you take into account that his other book is literally called Nudge, in which case the 2nd part of the book is rendered almost completely redundant.
4. The second part of the book seems more like a Defendant's speech for nudging, instead of exploring the theory itself.
If you've read Nudge, skip this.
If you haven't read Nudge, I don't have a recommendation yet, but probably skip this too.
TLDR:
1. Misleading title - "How We Change" only pertains to the first 1/3 of the book, and maybe slightly more if you
2. Badly joined together, works better as three separate books. As he himself said in the preface, "Do not make for a unitary narrative" indeed.
3. Incredibly repetitive, monotonous, and tedious to read through. Uses not just the same examples for different arguments/rebuttals, but the same explanations of why those examples are relevant to the conversation. Regurgitate almost word to word the same theories in different sections. Needless explanations. Dry sentence structures. This is before you take into account that his other book is literally called Nudge, in which case the 2nd part of the book is rendered almost completely redundant.
4. The second part of the book seems more like a Defendant's speech for nudging, instead of exploring the theory itself.
If you've read Nudge, skip this.
If you haven't read Nudge, I don't have a recommendation yet, but probably skip this too.
cwcobb's review against another edition
2.0
Misleading title with no cohesive theme. Dense and uninteresting, a rehash of many of the concepts from his prior works on the concept of “nudges”.
derekouyang's review against another edition
3.0
I really appreciate the underlying argument, dressing up weak consequentialism in socialist-sounding "welfarism", but the execution is disjointed and at times pedantic.
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