A review by mjfmjfmjf
Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier

2.0

Disappointing. I expect more from this author and perhaps when he leaves his field of cryptography and to some extent computer security, I shouldn't. This book did have moments of brilliance - it kind of caught its stride around part 3 - but lost it before getting to the final section. So what was wrong? First of all it was basically a psychology book but written first-person and chatty as though it were a bad high school paper. And I've got a lot of familiarity with a lot of this material - and it came off untrustable - even when I knew or thought I knew it to be true. On the positive side the book shows a way to model the world that a software person could understand. I might be convinced by someone else that I was being unfair - but this book was no fun to read and took way longer than it should have.