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Much Ado about Nothing

Social sciences books seem to have an excellent track record of testing my patience. Recently, I borrowed a highly rated book, The Paradox of Choice : Why More is Less. The fundamental concept explored by the book was that having more choices usually resulted in more disappointment.

Well, My Barry Shwartz(author of the book), I kind of knew that. I was hoping you would tell me how to get around it. Instead you go around for 200 pages saying again and again why more choice equals to more disappointment. You throw in all kinds of studies done by psychologists, employed perhaps for the sole purpose of creating employment. All your studies point to the one ultimate truth that is the title of your book, which makes me wonder why they did not stop at one study but kept doing more to prove something that had already been proven? You state 'We get catalogs for clothes, luggage, housewares, furniture, kitchen appliances, gourmet food, athletic gear, computer equipment, linens, bathroom furnishings,and a few unusual gifts, plus a few that are hard to classify' when you could have just stated 'We get catalogs for large variety of things'.

A friend of mine once wrote

Most of the social sciences are just attempts to make trivially simple concepts sound ridiculously complicated and making a big hoo haa about it. Period.  

I couldn't agree more.

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