Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Simon Blackburn, "Think: A compelling introduction to philosophy", Oxford University Press, 1999. Why did I read this introductory philosophy text? Well, firstly, to refresh my knowledge, and secondly, because it was suggested by Conceptually.org   as a book that can improve one's "cognitive toolkit" (the other books are on my to-read list as well). I will say upfront that this book deals only with Western analytic philosophy, and that it does not even cover all the influential philosophers and their theories within analytic philosophy. For example, Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Peirce, Ayer, Popper, Rawls and Searle are nowhere mentioned in Think . That being said, the book does a fair job of presenting the core areas and classic thinkers of philosophy: Chapter 1 is about knowledge (or epistemology), or how we can think about the relation between our perceptions of reality and reality itself. Simon Blackburn begins with René Descartes 's ...

Book Review: Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions", William Collins, 2016. After finishing "Decisive" by Chip and Dan Heath , which prescribes a somewhat algorithmic approach to making decisions using the WRAP process, I started reading "Algorithms to Live By". This is a book about what humans can learn from computers, specifically from computer algorithms  -- i.e. sequences of steps that are used to solve problems. The problems faced by computer scientists, like how to allocate processing power, when to switch between different tasks, how to use memory resources, and when to collect more data, have parallels in the everyday problems of human thought and action and interaction. As such, the computer scientist's solutions to these problems (whether optimal or merely approximate) can give us some wisdom. Sometimes that wisdom is bittersweet, for instance: "Life is full of problem...

Book Review: Chip Heath & Dan Heath, "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work", Crown Business, 2013. This book by the Heath brothers is about the decision-making process, and as such is not about good outcomes per se . As the authors write in chapter 12, "We can't know when we make a choice whether it will be successful. Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices." This quote reminds one of a similar point made by Stuart Sutherland in his book "Irrationality", which I have previously reviewed : rational thought and action does not guarantee that you will always achieve the best possible outcome, but in the long run, rationality maximizes your chance of success. So Decisive  is really about using a process for decision-making in order to make better decisions, which cannot be evaluated merely by their out...

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...