Blastland’s book ‘The Hidden Half’ has a catchy premise: how do predictions based on factual findings materialize into a dichotomy, sometimes right, other times wrong? Is there a hidden half of things that we miss in every case? If so, could understanding or figuring out that hidden half help us understand things in complete terms?
The arguments in this book, based on different case studies, from tobacco to economy, from sports to diseases, all try to capture the otherwise hidden and thereby ignored half of the story. The actual book itself, on the other hand, is more in the grey land than its catchy title and premise.
While the title of the book is luring due to its ‘pop-culture’ vibe to it, tickling but only the surface of reader’s curiosity and presenting short but appealing cases on the book cover, the content, when the reader finally chooses to read this book, is not as promising. Blastland may know there exists a ‘hidden half’, but he sure doesn’t know what it is.
The very intent behind bringing up the metaphor of another half that is usually ignored or hidden is to show the unreliability of the half that is presented through rigorous data and stats. In this aim of shaking the blindly firm grounds of statistics and human insights based on these data, Blastland succeeds brilliantly. Given his compelling arguments based on relevant and impressive case studies, Blastland consistently proves why our statistical knowledge, which otherwise is the most reliable source for human accuracy, is both porous and misleading.
The chapters of this book, one by one, picks out the flaws in current research methods and its results that are driven out of these research papers. Generalizing the result of a paper, which was conducted with the help of prior papers (already under the layers of time) and with primary data collected from a sample of the total population, is one of the most common practices of researchers, be it from any field. But ‘now is not then, here is not there, big is not small, probability is exactly that… ‘probability’, all of these arguments that Blastland places with the help of supportive anecdotes from all fields, proves one at a time that why our statistical knowledge and the foresight presented, often times too boldly, on the basis of such prosaic knowledge is inevitably unreliable.
One of cases that I remember from this book is the case of twins, and how, despite rigorously keeping everything constant and consistent for the both the twins, they turn out to be totally different persons. Given their matching genetics which makes for a biologically similar pair, and Blastland’s proposed ‘rigorously matching environment’ which ensures the consistency of external factors for both the twins, it shall be logically realistic for people to assume both the twins would grow up to be the same persons. But the fact that they don’t, despite the favorable conditions, shows the existence and power of the ‘hidden half’.
Yet the hidden half is highly ambiguous, complex, and infinitely vast that it is outside of human power to be able to figure it out. Therefore, certainty, about anything in this half, is impossible. This very nature of Blastland’s book becomes its own demise, mainly that it is frustrating and uncomfortable.
Although Blastland, at the end of the book, writes a chapter about what to do with the knowledge, or lack thereof, that this book has presented, it nevertheless remains a particularly unsettling book – therefore, unenjoyable as well.
Ratings: 3/5 *** March
1, 2021_