Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things Review

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(More customer reviews)I must start by saying I only read the first 65 or so pages (about 1/3rd of the book) before the author lost my attention. She filled the first several pages with a shallow discussion of commom tenets your parents or teachers probably already shared with you. I paraphrase: 'Stop and think before you act'; 'What you don't know CAN hurt you'; 'Don't miss the forest for the trees.'
In the subsequent chapters, she attempted to dive more deeply into the reasons these tenets ring true. As I read through the discussion, I came away with the distinct impression that I was stuck in an entry level class on human behavior at a community college. Her analysis lacked depth; her analogies were flat or did not fit. She offered little insight into an intriguing topic.
Based on the reviews I read before purchasing the book, I expected more rigor and critical analysis than I found. The book's concept has promise. Unfortunately, the author did not deliver.
Because I was intrigued by the topic, I've continued to look for books that could better help me understand common blind spots. Although narrowly focused on the idea of self-deception, I thought "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" gave a thorough analysis of a common blind spot many of us experience.
I also found meaningful insights about the physiology of the brain that creates some of our blind spots in "On Being Certain." The author's statements were supported by conclusions drawn from peer-reviewed studies - the type of rigor I expected but did not find in 'Blind Spots.'

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Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking Review

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(More customer reviews)One of my favorite quotes is from Robert Wright's "Moral Animal:" "...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse." Although this book is not about the morality of our decision-making, it is completely about how we delude ourselves about ourselves, our situations, and others.
Borrowing heavily from Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine, and Skeptic Inquirer, Kida starts off with standard issue debunking of pseudoscience. Soon he zeroes in and concentrates on the faulty ways we reach assessments. These methods worked quite well in our small tribe hunting-gathering days, but nowadays we could do better.
At the risk of losing half the readers of this review, I'll spill the beans. Kida believes in statistics, whereas people evolved to believe in anecdotes. People confidently rely on intuition, then remember the hits and ignore the misses. People seek to confirm what they already believe and gloss over contradictory evidence. People rarely consider the role of chance and coincidence, preferring to give credit to metaphysical causes. People consistently misinterpret events to bolster their deluded self-images. People oversimplify complex situations, tending to shun the gray areas for black or white assessments. Finally, our memories are the pits - remolding and enhancing the original memory more and more as time goes by.
For the above data, Kida has documentation galore, but in the face of volumes of evidence, we continue to do more of the same. After blasting our anecdotal way of proving our theories, Kida uses his own anecdotes, saying "we evolved to love learning from stories." The difference is, the stories he tells survive sophisticated statistical analysis of the data.
There are fascinating stories on every page of this book, with conclusions that will bowl you over if you're not used to this kind of analysis - but it's so true to life. Every day, I hear people justifying their decisions on the basis of someone else's single experience, their own biased conclusion based on erroneous information, a TV show, a hot tip, or other bad data. Every day, I hear stories told that have been enhanced. Confrontations usually don't turn out quite as well as what is later reported to spellbound listeners.
I wish all high schools and colleges would offer a required course on critical thinking - for that group that really would like to take a more scientific approach, but didn't know it existed. Prepare to be blown away - this is a great book!


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Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists Review

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(More customer reviews)Are ten percent of Americans gay? Is the white male in the work force rapidly becoming a minority? Are 150,000 young American women dying each year from anorexia?
Joel Best clearly answers "no" to each of these three questions and, more importantly, shows why many people would say "yes". His point is that descriptive statistics are the product of a social activity, not just a representation of society. Social advocacy causes people to collect the data that they feel will best support their preconceived notions: They talk to unrepresentative groups. They start to collect new measures and then wonder why the "statistics" have grown since ten years earlier (when they weren't much -- if at all -- measured). They multiply erroneous assumptions. They mutate data. And the press and other publications carry the mutations forward.
This book offers plenty of illustrations of intentions run amok. Many of the reports provide useful information for a classroom lecture on the need to discern if a person is "speaking rot", as Harold Macmillan once said was the primary purpose of an education.
A good, crisp 171 pages in length, it is absent discussion of the more difficult inferential statistics and, as a result, it is easy to understand by the lay person.

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