Content tagged with "critical-thinking"
this book has 99 chapters. that seems like a lot, but they’re quite short – some just 2-3 pages. each chapter discusses a cognitive fallacy or bias of some kind. things like: Survivor bias Confirmation bias Feature positive preference These are mental potholes that we fall prey to again and again,…
A good examination of why people spit BS, and how to debunk it. It drifts into a standard list of cognitive fallacies and statistical mistakes somewhere in the middle. But still, it’s generally very good. The author makes a point that some people’s identity hinges on their BS , so they defend it…
This is quite a good book about the “safe space” concept, mostly at universities. It’s very similar to The Parasitic Mind or The Constitution of Knowledge. It fights back against three “untruths”: They do a little cherry-picking of liberal weirdness on the fringes. They go deep, for example, into…
This is a polemic against misinformation. It was written post-Trump, and Trump informs and motivates a lot of it. The author is retaliating against what he sees as the basic corruption of truth. We’ve arrived at a point in society where we can simply deny any truth that we don’t like and limit…
This is a nice little introduction of logical fallacies, with examples of how we encounter them in real life. Each chapter is an introduction to a category of fallacies, and then it’s further broken down into specifics. The author covers things like Post Hoc fallacies, refutation by reputation, ad…
I abandoned this book, but not by choice – truth is, I lost it about 2/3s of the way through . The book was…okay. True to the tag line, it presents a series of thought models with which to evaluate decisions. Some I had heard of and some were new. Some seemed valuable, others didn’t seem like they…
This is a book about how we don’t like reality anymore. We like the illusion of reality. As a society, we’re addicted to farce. It’s almost hilarious that this was written in 2009. If only the author had seen what was coming. He talks about “the illusion of literacy,” by contrasting it against…
This is a…cute, book. That’s the only way I can really characterize it. It’s a small book. Every two-page spread represents one or more logical fallacies. The left page is a description, and the right page is a drawing meant to illustrate the fallacy. The drawings are of anthropomorphized animals….
A book about how smart people are sometimes very stupid. Sometimes, we can be so smart and analytical that we outsmart ourselves, lose sight of the forest for the trees, and come full-circle back to stupid. One example is Arthur Conan-Doyle, the nominally brilliant author of Sherlock Holmes. He was…
It delivers on the title – the book is a description of 60 habits and mind exercises you can do to get smarter. It’s okay. Some of the chapters are really drawn-out/padded, and the authors go down really esoteric rabbit holes sometimes – there’s a weirdly long chapter in there about 4D…
This is literally a textbook – the author says much at the beginning. He’s a professor at the University of Michigan, and he writes about how a friend asked him to resurrect a course on statistical modeling. That course became this book. Models are ways of thinking and analyzing a subject. It’s a…
I enjoyed this book, but understand that it’s not a simple book of techniques or direction. The author goes deep into the human mind – the swear, the first chapter is a lesson in neurological anatomy. You’ll read more about the human brain than you probably care to know. The book is interesting, but…
The author of this book is very angry about misconceptions that people have and the fact that they continue to have them. He comes down pretty squarely on the political Right, but he never actually articulates a political position. He’s furious about “political correctness.” He’s also not a fan of…
This book caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994. This is the quote that upset a lot of people: The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one. The author was basically saying that evangelical Christians have stopped thinking rationally about anything. Unfortunately, it was a…
At first, I didn’t like this book, but it won me over in the end. At its heart, it’s about confirmation bias – how we defend our positions by acknowledge evidence in favor of them and ignoring or downplaying evidence against them. Galef calls this “the soldier mindset,” because we’re always…
Neat book full of mental models from all domains. It’s well-written, and will expose you to a lot of things you sort of now, but haven’t quite articulated. The only downside is that it doesn’t go too deep, but that’s not really the intention.
Highly readable discussion about how hard it is to predict the future, and all the cognitive traps we fall into when we try to do so. Includes a handy list of Ten Commandments of Super Forecasting.
This book should have been called, “How to Make Decisions,” as this is basically what it is – a series of frameworks for making decisions. The first chapter has some business fiction – a company is arguing about whether or not to purchase a new delivery truck. I normally hate business fiction, and…
Another book about behavioral science and social psychology. It’s an entertaining read, but doesn’t really break new ground. It’s basically a bunch of chapter of themes, each of which is a bunch of anecdotes stacked on each other, a la Gladwell.
A solid review of the standard logical fallacies that people fall for again and again. Each chapter covers one, and they’re short and well-explained. Weirdly profane, which seemed a little out of place.
