All the Malcolm Gladwell stuff, specifically Outliers. Pretty much everything he writes falls apart with any intellectual rigor and is always presented in the formula of: anecdote, anecdote, interesting fact, sweeping theory presented as truth.
Like the "10,000 hour rule," which sucks from so many directions. So it doesn't matter how you practice or with what regularity? Why are there so many life-long musicians and only 4 Beatles then? How come EVERY task takes the same amount of time to master? What exactly is meant by mastery? Doesn't the precision of 10,000 hours seem suspiciously convenient? Is there ever a noticable division between mastery/pre-mastery? And if the exactness of 10,000 hours is fuzzy and the concept of mastery is fuzzy, then isn't the "rule" just saying "you will improve with lots of time and effort"? What is the useful insight again?
The book seems to have found success as a kind of an earworm for people who like sharing the interesting facts and neat anecdotes packaged into marketable nuggets, but the sheen of genius insights and intelligent discourse is exactly counter to the product being sold. It feels to me exactly like an intellectual scam.
Going by mentions in this thread, I rarely put a book down once I've started it but Antifragile was one of them. Somehow I couldn't get through it, though I don't remember what was so bad about it.
The Circle is "preaching to the church" as we say. Anyone who reads that book already is aware of all the concerns it raises. The one thing it doesn't do is answer the question whether it might be a good thing and indeed force us to be better if everything is recorded all the time. It's open ended. There is literally no point to reading this book, and on top of that the first 2/3rds are written like a third grader might write a report of a very dull person's life.
Not sure I've read many other books that I ended up hating. For example, Dan Ariely's Dollars and Sense was as average as his Predictably Irrational was good/entertaining, but I didn't hate it.
