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Stefan Gugler's Reviews > Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
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Yeah, no.
I don't have the energy to go back and cite representative passages but it really didn't do much for me. It's just one more of those "hard-ass man explains how to be a rational� hard-ass" book. It felt like the bland third child to save the marriage between 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People: The Ultimate Revelations Of Steven Covey and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Chris Voss is so incredibly full of himself that at time I just had to put the book away. But what about the content?
I guess it depends on how many of such guide books you've already read. It's always the same: some nice anecdotes where the author or one of their student comes out on top, "analysis" of said anecdote, some disparaging words on how "theory" or other methods can't solve the problem, then their solution and in the end a trusty summary in 6 bullet points, just how they learned it in the Harvard MBA Business Enterprise Leadership Harvard Management School of Managers. I can't say that this formula is never useful. I can't say The 48 Laws of Power didn't influence me when I was 14. Sure: These books might provide heuristics if you can't yet think for yourself and might work in some few, highly contrived, certified survivorship bias filtered situations. Fair enough. But in most scenarios, it's just very unlikely to help you. Mostly it just comes down to not be a prick. Listen to the other party. Be honest. What irked me, despite the unscientificness of the claims, is that it always felt manipulative. "You can even use these tactics with your wife, haha", is something you wouldn't be surprised to read in that book. Men will literally become crisis negotiators instead of going to therapy.
(Just as a small example: He says that you have to give a steep anchor point when negotiating a price. E.g. you only offer 65% of the value of the thing you want. I just cannot fathom, if somebody offered me 65% of the price of a thing that I know very well the price of, that I'd cave. I mean, we can argue about this, but without some nice statistics it's just a baseless claim. And I'm not sure where are with our psychological methodology, Kahnemannian paradigm crumbling and all.)
In the last section he talks about "Black Swans", basically a hidden piece of information about your adversary that makes you win. He literally references Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable but fails to understand it. He talks past the idea and is obviously just intrigued by the aesthetic but I'd bet 5:1 that Taleb would eat Voss alive and call him a charlatan. Even Voss' company is called Black Swan Ltd which is an absolute joke.
Everything about this is a joke and now that I wrote this I feel it's even more of a 1.5* than a 2*, so there's that.
I don't have the energy to go back and cite representative passages but it really didn't do much for me. It's just one more of those "hard-ass man explains how to be a rational� hard-ass" book. It felt like the bland third child to save the marriage between 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People: The Ultimate Revelations Of Steven Covey and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Chris Voss is so incredibly full of himself that at time I just had to put the book away. But what about the content?
I guess it depends on how many of such guide books you've already read. It's always the same: some nice anecdotes where the author or one of their student comes out on top, "analysis" of said anecdote, some disparaging words on how "theory" or other methods can't solve the problem, then their solution and in the end a trusty summary in 6 bullet points, just how they learned it in the Harvard MBA Business Enterprise Leadership Harvard Management School of Managers. I can't say that this formula is never useful. I can't say The 48 Laws of Power didn't influence me when I was 14. Sure: These books might provide heuristics if you can't yet think for yourself and might work in some few, highly contrived, certified survivorship bias filtered situations. Fair enough. But in most scenarios, it's just very unlikely to help you. Mostly it just comes down to not be a prick. Listen to the other party. Be honest. What irked me, despite the unscientificness of the claims, is that it always felt manipulative. "You can even use these tactics with your wife, haha", is something you wouldn't be surprised to read in that book. Men will literally become crisis negotiators instead of going to therapy.
(Just as a small example: He says that you have to give a steep anchor point when negotiating a price. E.g. you only offer 65% of the value of the thing you want. I just cannot fathom, if somebody offered me 65% of the price of a thing that I know very well the price of, that I'd cave. I mean, we can argue about this, but without some nice statistics it's just a baseless claim. And I'm not sure where are with our psychological methodology, Kahnemannian paradigm crumbling and all.)
In the last section he talks about "Black Swans", basically a hidden piece of information about your adversary that makes you win. He literally references Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable but fails to understand it. He talks past the idea and is obviously just intrigued by the aesthetic but I'd bet 5:1 that Taleb would eat Voss alive and call him a charlatan. Even Voss' company is called Black Swan Ltd which is an absolute joke.
Everything about this is a joke and now that I wrote this I feel it's even more of a 1.5* than a 2*, so there's that.
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Never Split the Difference.
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Reading Progress
December 6, 2020
– Shelved as:
to-read
December 6, 2020
– Shelved
September 1, 2021
–
Started Reading
September 1, 2021
–
19.0%
""Self-important dude narrativizes his life such that he comes out on top" book number 78991"
September 3, 2021
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33.0%
September 5, 2021
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49.0%
September 6, 2021
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58.0%
"Apart from many things that make me roll my eyes, how do even people that might only read the book for instrumental/game-theoretic reasons take an author seriously that writes things like
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September 8, 2021
–
63.0%
September 13, 2021
–
Finished Reading
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Alex
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rated it 1 star
Sep 27, 2021 12:39AM
I'm interested in your saying 'Kahnemannian paradigm crumbling'. Please could you expand on what you mean by this, or point me towards any recommended reading?
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Hi anon, thanks for the comment. One example is Taleb ranting from time to time against people like the dude behind Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Cass Sunstein and his friend, or Kahneman. I don't have a particular source for that but it is, as usual, something something fat tails. Whereas I understand the math, I don't understand psychological study design at all, so I can't really evaluate that claim.Maybe more pertinently, Kahneman himself concedes some points, e.g. here:
Schimmack writes very intelligently about the replication crisis in regards to Thinking Fast and Slow[2,3]. His writings are generally quite interesting (but of course sometimes to be taken with a grain of salt). If you are not familiar with the replication crisis, check the Wiki Article, it's an entire thing: [4]
All this is not to say that Kahneman is a great scientist and brought many people and institutions to reflect on biases which certainly exist, albeit maybe in different shapes and forms than outlined in his book. The science of psychology is just still in its long infancy until it will be able to have actually accurate and highly reliable and replicable results.
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That's very interesting, thank you so much for the reply.
