Customer Reviews

Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Albrecht has hit the daily double with this new book. It is the perfect companion to his Social Intelligence book. This book, Practical Intelligence, goes way beyond what you'd expect from a book that is helping you improve your common sense and street smarts. Albrecht gives us new ways to think about thinking, introduces us to the different ways our minds work, and shares with us that we are not either/or thinkers but both/and thinkers. His various continuums of thinking help us understand why we think what we think and how to apply what we are thinking about. Plus, he backs up his positions with actual research results. Albrecht continues to help us improve our minds at work!

Everyone knows a few super-smart people who continually do super-stupid things. Sure, they can finish a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in less than 10 minutes, play and win three simultaneous chess games handily and multiply seven digit numbers faster than a calculator. But they also can't hold a job, are given to fulminating about bizarre pet causes ("Restore the Carolingian Dynasty now!") and can't shut up about their "brilliant" ideas ("You mean you didn't read my 427-page proof of Goldbach's conjecture yet?"). What's going on? Well, if Karl Albrecht's ideas are right, IQ isn't the whole story of human intelligence. And it may not even be most of the story. Perhaps more important than raw IQ, particularly in today's world, is practical intelligence: the ability to use common-sense reasoning in a structured way to solve relevant problems. Fortunately, practical intelligence, like other mental skills, is not fixed at birth. How can you develop it? Start with this sensible book, which we recommend to anyone who wants to be not only smart but also effective.

Karl Albrecht is a management consultant who over the years has developed a great breath and depth of knowledge about the mind and creativity. He demonstrates this in this book. My only complaint about the book is that it spends too much time discussing the physical struture of the brain and the specific functions of each brain section; a brief overview would have sufficed. Otherwise, Albrecht covers exceedingly well the many ways that we can make ourselves more creative and pratically intelligent. He gives clear descriptions of both good and bad thinking habits, and prescriptions for how to strenghten the good ones. I like how Albrecht, walking the walk, creates his own new categories of thinkers, not that these are necessarily scientifically correct, as they are somewhat speculative and based mostly on his own experience; however, these creations are a good example of a thinker who breaks out of his routine mode of thinking to come up with new ideas. The content of this book is a good reminder of how we can get stuck in thinking ruts, and a great handbook for finding ways out of those ruts.

I read the first 10% of the book encountered nothing new and novel except gross abuse of authorship to redefine words to a point of vagueness (in particular, "intelligence" gets conflated to "competence" and "thinking" gets conflated to "holistic mood") that makes them impractical for identifying any particular thing. The actual core of the book doesn't appear to start until page 84 (~20% in) and even then includes exceptionally dubiously penned phrases like "helicopter thinking." Skipping ahead to page 250, we get the actual definition "Helicopter Thinking: A thinking process that integrates both abstract and concrete patterns of ideation into a synergistic combination." I'm not sure that anybody who can actually read that (with or without a straight face) actually needs to read the contents of the book, but maybe I'm just not really part of the target audience.

i enjoyed reading this book. it is well written and had a lot of facts that i have found useful

Practical Intelligence is anything but. From its overly simplistic characterizations of brain activity to the incessant production of neologisms (it looks as if he's trying to come up with at least one that will stick in popular business culture so he can claim credit for it), this book seems like a hash of every idea the author took a liking to over the last decade or two. Much of the material is obvious, too much is banal, a little is useful, and on some very important matters Albrecht's ideas are both wrong and dangerous. In particular, Albrecht's treatment of mind in chapter three has a pronounced determinist slant which he appears not to notice. In the same chapter he tells us "We don't actually see reality.", yet in chapter four he tells us that all of what we call "reality" is in a state of constant evolution. How do we know this if we don't actually see reality? He is apparently unaware of the fact that many people with much sharper philosophical acuity than his--including Aristotle!--have made powerful cases for the claim that we do indeed have access to reality. But his most egregious nonsense appears in his treatment of truth (chapter four again). After informing us that dogma is a bad, bad thing, and labeling it a characteristic of archaic, "simplex" thinking, he goes on to propose his own dogma: All "truth" is local to the brains in which it resides. Not only is this a ridiculous claim, it is also self-contradictory. He makes a universal claim to deny all claims of universality. That is neither practical nor intelligent. For real help with thinking, a good book on logic and rhetoric would be far more beneficial.The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric

The basic review of brain structure and physiology is appreciated. Beyond that I find nothing of particular interest.

Unless you have been in a coma for the past 50 years, you won't find this book very useful. The author primarily makes reference to the work of Irving Janis, Alex Osbourne, Maxwell Maltz and Alfred Koryzbski, while making only fleeting references to anything more recent. There are no references to the work of Robert Sternberg, who would have to be considered an authority in this field. There are no references to the work of Gary Klein, who again has highlighted the role and mechanisms of intuition in the use of expertise.

The author's P.I.N. method was invented years before by Edward de Bono, none of whose work in the past 15 years is cited. Mind-maps are primarily associated with Tony Buzan who expanded and popularised the concept years ago, yet he gets only a footnote. Rather than rigorous thought there is instead a plethora of unnecesaary neologisms.