Omne ignotum pro magnifico

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...

Book Review: Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler, "Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter", Harper, 2018. If you are familiar with the research on cognitive heuristics and biases, then you have probably heard of Dan Ariely -- the Duke professor who founded the Center for Advanced Hindsight and wrote a number of bestsellers including "Predictably Irrational", "The Upside of Irrationality" and "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty". His latest book is a collaboration with the comedian Jeff Kreisler, who speaks a lot on the topic of money. It is called, in a punny way, Dollars and Sense  (although there is also a British edition titled Small Change: Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them ). In the Introduction, the authors emphasize the relevance of a book like this: we all think about money on a regular basis because it touches most aspects of our lives. Yet by thinking about it, we don't necessarily make good decisions....

Book Review: Stuart Sutherland, "Irrationality", Pinter & Martin, 2007. Back in 1992, the British writer and professor of psychology Stuart Sutherland (now deceased) published a book simply titled Irrationality , which foreshadowed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow by nearly two decades. Recently, I finished reading the second (2007) edition, although a newer edition (2013) is also available. In the preface, Sutherland states his mission: to demonstrate, using research from psychology, that irrational behavior is the norm (not the exception) in our everyday lives. And this book covers a wide range of irrational phenomena, many of which will be familiar to those who've read Kahneman or who follow rationalist blogs like Less Wrong . And if you're not familiar with the literature, this book will convince you that indeed, humans are probably not rational creatures (in case you needed to be convinced of that). Since I believe this topic is so im...