A Crowd of One: The New Science and Technology of Understanding and Controlling Human Nature Book

There are many individual gem stones in this book. The author discussed a lot of relatively new social science findings. Depending on how well read you are about these new findings, some may strike you as (very) old news. (For instance that it's no longer the orthodox to treat human beings as rational, selfish individuals. Holding elections in Afghanistan is perhaps not really seeding democracy as much as applying a cosmetic overlay on a feudal system. ) But overall, you can still pick up a lot of interesting tidbits (e.g., Scottish enlightenment happened in a short 75 years). But the whole book lacks a cohesive theme or it's not getting through to me. Every chapter reads like a relatively well-written, but autonomous magazine column. But even then, sometimes the eureka revelations are not as robust as it first appears. For instance, at one point the author says we should not be recommending developing societies to ape Western institutions. But rather consider the importance of creating conditions to allow their own viable institutions. This really sounded like wisdom first. But when you do sit down and think of it, the reality is not like today's Western governments are actively trying to impose their institutions in developing world.

The author said that "the book has been a long time in the making" (That's literally the first sentence of the book.) It felt like he finally sat down to assemble lots of random thoughts into twelves chapters. It wasn't clear whether the book was describing a current or impending problem, proposing a solution to said problem, or given alternative interpretation to observed phenomena. It's a little bit of each. For instance, a lot of part of the book explained terrorism, but the last chapter explains how digital institutions can work (exhibit 1: eBay manage to build digital trust). Even the meaning of the supposedly revelational title term "A crowd of one" is unclear to me. (I get that we all have individual identity as well as group identity. And perhaps the digital age is greatly amplifying the individual identity. My question is still, so?)

Reading the praiser's review didn't really help much. One reviewer literally said:

"*As jumbled as it is*, this is a devilishly good and interesting book. Because of the rather haphazard organization, one has to read it twice, first from front to back and then in reverse to get the full impact of the substance and the author's main points"

Any book that requires the reader to go twice (once in reverse) only to understand is just not a well made product. Maybe one day, I'll follow the advice and read backwards. But until then, this has been demoted to 2 stars.