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Brilliant: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions
How can you make smart decisions? Do more choices make you happier? What steps can you take to curtail stress when selecting from a sea of options?
Barry Schwartz gives you practical and science-based answers to these questions in this audio series. The author of the seminal best seller The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Schwartz has spent five decades teaching decision science. Now, this 14-lecture audio course lets you experience the same panache that has wowed Swarthmore College undergraduates and business school students at UC Berkeley and NYU.
Barry Schwartz gives you practical and science-based answers to these questions in this audio series. The author of the seminal best seller The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Schwartz has spent five decades teaching decision science. Now, this 14-lecture audio course lets you experience the same panache that has wowed Swarthmore College undergraduates and business school students at UC Berkeley and NYU.
Unknown Binding
Published January 5, 2019
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About the author
Barry Schwartz
49 books593 followers an American psychologist. Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He frequently publishes editorials in the New York Times applying his research in psychology to current events.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 1, 2020
Added notes to Note - Audible Book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 21, 2020
Good information.
July 10, 2021
Nice survey of decision making basics. Enjoyable lecture format
September 10, 2025
Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist, the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, and, since 2016, visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics, with particular emphasis on morality, decision-making, and the interrelationships between behavioural science and society (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_S...).
Surprisingly enough, I have not read any of his books (e.g. Why We Work, 2015; The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, 2004; The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life, 2001), and although his bestseller The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less seems interesting, my interests lie elsewhere at the moment, and Barry Schwartz’s TED talk will have to do (TED, ‘The paradox of choice’, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XE...).
In terms of format, Brilliant is an audiobook consisting of 14 lectures of about 25 minutes each. It appeared as a recommendation on Everand, which I chose as the best option for my listening pleasure at that moment.
The blurb says:
I cannot say I have been ‘wowed’, but Brilliant is a neat overview of decision-making basics in a convenient lecture format. Most of the topics, however, are already covered in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, both of which I read several years ago.
Barry Schwartz’s TED talks on the meaning of work (TED, ‘The way we think about work is broken’, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B_1i...) and the role of luck in life (TED, ‘What role does luck play in your life?’, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm75F...) are also well worth a listen.
‘The way we think about work is broken’ was particularly interesting. Barry Schwartz refers to Clifford Geertz, who said that people were the ‘unfinished animals’, by which he meant that human nature is malleable—created rather than discovered. It is the product of the society in which people live. Our place of work creates people fitted to the demands of that place of work.
Adam Smith, one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, said of those who worked on assembly lines: ‘He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become.’ Schwartz’s closing question strikes me as excruciatingly poignant in a world so rapidly overtaken by AI: What kind of human nature do you want to help design?
Because—as I found myself saying in a conversation about the nature of work with a fellow dog-walker yesterday—if we allow AI to take over so much of our work, if we let it perform so much of the mundane, repetitive (intellectual) labour for us, we are destined to see our abilities wither in brain-deadening stupor. We risk losing the capacity to formulate our own thoughts, to sit with a problem until it is resolved (for hours if need be), and to discover our creativity emerging in ourselves in response to the world around us, rather than as the product of a quick AI prompt.
Concerning the role of luck in life—‘What role does luck play in your life?’, which I have just heard—Barry Schwartz mentions John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and his concept of the ‘veil of ignorance’. This asks: If you did not know what your position in society was going to be, what kind of society would you want to create? Rawls suggests that, if we were unaware of whether we would enter society at the top or at the bottom, we would surely want a society that was based on equality, so that even the unlucky could live decent, meaningful, and satisfying lives.
After yesterday’s conversation, which was with yet another STEM professional, the divide that is steadily expanding between the techies and the rest of humanity feels even more alarming, because so many of them seem to be so excruciatingly ill-equipped to grasp the ideas entertained by the humanities and remain largely indifferent to the plight of the millions whose livelihoods are being, and will be, affected by AI.
So let me repeat the question: What kind of human nature do you want to help design? Because the one emerging in the unimaginably volatile conditions of the world we all share right now feels disturbingly dystopian to most of us.
Surprisingly enough, I have not read any of his books (e.g. Why We Work, 2015; The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, 2004; The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life, 2001), and although his bestseller The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less seems interesting, my interests lie elsewhere at the moment, and Barry Schwartz’s TED talk will have to do (TED, ‘The paradox of choice’, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XE...).
In terms of format, Brilliant is an audiobook consisting of 14 lectures of about 25 minutes each. It appeared as a recommendation on Everand, which I chose as the best option for my listening pleasure at that moment.
The blurb says:
How can you make smart decisions? Do more choices make you happier? What steps can you take to curtail stress when selecting from a sea of options?
Barry Schwartz gives you practical and science-based answers to these questions in this audio series. The author of the seminal best seller The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Schwartz has spent five decades teaching decision science. Now, this 14-lecture audio course lets you experience the same panache that has wowed Swarthmore College undergraduates and business school students at UC Berkeley and NYU.
I cannot say I have been ‘wowed’, but Brilliant is a neat overview of decision-making basics in a convenient lecture format. Most of the topics, however, are already covered in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, both of which I read several years ago.
Barry Schwartz’s TED talks on the meaning of work (TED, ‘The way we think about work is broken’, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B_1i...) and the role of luck in life (TED, ‘What role does luck play in your life?’, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm75F...) are also well worth a listen.
‘The way we think about work is broken’ was particularly interesting. Barry Schwartz refers to Clifford Geertz, who said that people were the ‘unfinished animals’, by which he meant that human nature is malleable—created rather than discovered. It is the product of the society in which people live. Our place of work creates people fitted to the demands of that place of work.
Adam Smith, one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, said of those who worked on assembly lines: ‘He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become.’ Schwartz’s closing question strikes me as excruciatingly poignant in a world so rapidly overtaken by AI: What kind of human nature do you want to help design?
Because—as I found myself saying in a conversation about the nature of work with a fellow dog-walker yesterday—if we allow AI to take over so much of our work, if we let it perform so much of the mundane, repetitive (intellectual) labour for us, we are destined to see our abilities wither in brain-deadening stupor. We risk losing the capacity to formulate our own thoughts, to sit with a problem until it is resolved (for hours if need be), and to discover our creativity emerging in ourselves in response to the world around us, rather than as the product of a quick AI prompt.
Concerning the role of luck in life—‘What role does luck play in your life?’, which I have just heard—Barry Schwartz mentions John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and his concept of the ‘veil of ignorance’. This asks: If you did not know what your position in society was going to be, what kind of society would you want to create? Rawls suggests that, if we were unaware of whether we would enter society at the top or at the bottom, we would surely want a society that was based on equality, so that even the unlucky could live decent, meaningful, and satisfying lives.
After yesterday’s conversation, which was with yet another STEM professional, the divide that is steadily expanding between the techies and the rest of humanity feels even more alarming, because so many of them seem to be so excruciatingly ill-equipped to grasp the ideas entertained by the humanities and remain largely indifferent to the plight of the millions whose livelihoods are being, and will be, affected by AI.
So let me repeat the question: What kind of human nature do you want to help design? Because the one emerging in the unimaginably volatile conditions of the world we all share right now feels disturbingly dystopian to most of us.
December 8, 2021
A good introductory course. If you've read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," which I recommend you do, a lot will be familiar to you, but you can't hear the good stuff too much. To sum it up, I think the first step in making better decisions is to recognize the ways we err in decision-making, and this course will certainly tell you that.
April 19, 2024
Helpful if you prefer a podcast or class-oriented format rather than a book. Most of the information is already covered in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which I recommend over this lecture series.
April 14, 2024
Feels like a rehash of thinking fast and slow, choice and nudge
July 3, 2023
This book reads more like a set of scientific and psychological study summaries than your typical business or "general population" "How to do X better" type of book. It's quite dry and the anecdotes and analogies are no Malcom Gladwell but if you're really interested in the science/psychology/sociology behind decision making then this is a good read.
As far as making better decisions, not sure I got much from that. Mostly it went through all the reasons why the decisions people make are bad and little on the "how to make better decisions" so the title is a little misleading there.
As far as making better decisions, not sure I got much from that. Mostly it went through all the reasons why the decisions people make are bad and little on the "how to make better decisions" so the title is a little misleading there.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews