Omne ignotum pro magnifico

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: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", Penguin Books, 2010. The MIRI and LessWrong founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, once wrote : "There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable  people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable  ones, because the universe isn't always reasonable . [...] If you keep on losing, perhaps you are doing something wrong . Do not console yourself about how you were so wonderfully rational in the course of losing. That is not  how things are supposed to go. It is not the Art that fails, but you who fails to grasp the Art." At the very least, a rationalist should avoid shooting their own foot off. As a corollary, they should avoid being a sucker -- which is certainly what the philosopher/statistician/trader/essayist Prof. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say...

Book Review: Niall Kishtainy, "A Little History of Economics", Yale University Press, 2017/2018. When I read Nigel Warburton's "A Little History of Philosophy" a few years back, I really enjoyed it for its clarity and brevity. So I was excited to pick up another book in the Little Histories series, and what better than one that tickles my fancy in economics? Hence A Little History of Economics , written by a UN policy adviser and LSE teacher by the name Niall Kishtainy. Reviewers have described this book as "highly readable", "accessible", "fast-paced", and "nontechnical". I agree. The book is over 240 pages long, but is divided into 40 chapters, meaning that the average chapter is only 6 pages, so it feels  like a breeze to read. The writing style is concise, with snappy sentences. Each chapter begins with a drawing related to the topic, which helps to liven things up. Besides these sketches, there are basically n...