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: Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, "Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models", Penguin Business, 2019. If you hang around the same corners of the internet as me, there is a chance you've encountered the Farnam Street blog's " latticework of mental models " or the site  Conceptually . Both promote the idea that so-called cognitive tools or mental models can enhance one's understanding of the world and help one make better decisions, by importing concepts from various fields and applying them more broadly. Economics, psychology, philosophy, physics, etc. all have their own sets of frameworks, shortcuts and models that help their practitioners explain things and cut through complexity. Yet by taking a multidisciplinary approach and analyzing a problem from different perspectives, we gain a more well-rounded understanding and reduce our blind spots. And with a "latticework of models" w...

Book Review: Charles Duhigg, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business", Random House, 2014. Previously I've written about the shopper research of Siemon Scamell-Katz, which paints an unflattering picture of humans in their modern habitat. For example, it seems that people don't look into the window before they enter a store, don't recall the name of the store they are in, don't find the products they are looking for even though those products are in the store, don't read signs, and remember almost none of the brand messages they are exposed to. Some people will say that a store is fantastic and that they've shopped through the whole store, while film footage shows them actually covering half the store and experiencing inconvenience. These post-hoc rationalizations occur because much of the time, people shop on "autopilot" -- and they tend to buy the same brands in the same stores. Scamell-Katz talks about behaviora...

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....