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When Intelligence Defeats Itself

Book Review: David Robson, "The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Stupid Mistakes -- and How to Make Wiser Decisions", Hodder & Stoughton, 2020.  [Alternative subtitle: "Revolutionise your thinking and make wiser decisions".] The Intelligence Trap is the story of how Nobel Prize-winning scientist Kary Mullis could believe in alien abductions, astrology, and AIDS denialism; how the Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle could believe in spiritualism and fairies; how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs could believe in a fruit juice diet as the cure for his cancer; how FBI fingerprint experts could have falsely accused Brandon Mayfield of the 2004 Madrid bombings; and how a team of engineers could have missed the warning signs before the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. The idea that intelligent people can be foolish is not a new one: there is a volume titled Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid , edited by Robert J. Sternberg (2002), and various related...
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Intelligent Design

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Book Review: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness", Penguin Books, 2009. Just over a decade ago, a book by the title Nudge took the world by storm. Today, there are numerous "nudge units" sponsored by governments (the most famous of which is the Behavioural Insights Team ), and one of the co-authors, Richard H. Thaler, won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Nudge is also listed on the Hufflepuff rationality bookshelf . Given the status of the book, it's odd that I haven't read it earlier. But now I have, and below are my notes. Nudge begins by asking how the director of food services for a city's school system should tell the cafeterias to arrange and display the food choices, knowing that (a) people, including kids, are influenced by small changes in context, such as the order of items, and (b) there's no way to avoid organizing the food. The authors, Richard Thaler and ...
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Thriving on Entropy

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Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder", Penguin Books, 2013. In his book Adapt , Tim Harford argues that we should be experimenting with multiple projects in parallel since not all of them will pay off, but when an experiment is successful, it can transform our lives for the better "in a way that a failed experiment will not transform them for the worse". This asymmetry lies at the heart of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile , which promotes the idea of antifragile tinkering or bricolage -- a kind of trial-and-error in which small mistakes are good and one wishes to "fail fast", because this gives one the option to keep a hugely favorable result while limiting the bad, as long as one has the rationality to identify and exploit large gains. (Incidentally, Taleb wrote a review for Harford's Adapt with rare praise: " Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down de...
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