Customer Reviews

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a good book. It's easy to read and can be read in small bite-sized chunks or in several long sessions. There are 48 different cognitive biases, shortcuts, and logical fallacies described in the book. They each take about 5 pages or so. Within each section the author does an excellent job of describing each problem. He references several studies for each and is generally very up-to-date on the latest work.

As an introduction or description to the ways we are irrational this book works very well. I consider myself pretty widely read in this area and still I found some new ideas or studies in this work. I would think that someone new to the topic would be utterly fascinated by it. While this book is well written as narrative it also would server as an excellent reference because of the many short chapters.

The only thing that I think would have made the book better would have been to put more effort into highlighting how you can avoid the biases. Certainly being aware of them helps and this book goes a long way toward that goal. The author does make some small suggestions at the very end of many chapters but they seem like an afterthought. But that is my only real criticism.

If you are interested in the ways that we aren't "the rational animal" this book is easily recommended. It is quite well done. For people new to the subject I can very highly recommend it as an introduction to the topic.

I'm a clinical psychologist interested in neuroscience, so much of this material was already familiar to me. Most of the ideas can be found scattered through other books like The Winner's Curse, The Happiness Hypothesis, Predictably Irrational, and others. I've read and admired all of those. I would gladly throw them all away if I could keep You are Not So Smart.

The author understands the science and the facts, and conveys them quite clearly. I didn't find a single error. He writes wonderfully. Crisp, clear, funny, casual, but not too casual. When I read it, I feel I'm chatting with a brilliant buddy. As I understand it, the author is not a professor or scientist. He's certainly smart enough to be one.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, research psychologists generally believed that humans are more or less rational, most of the time. They believed that irrational thinking was caused primarily by disruptive emotions like anger or fear. We now know this is just plain wrong. During the last twenty years or so, research evidence against this view accumulated. Daniel Kahneman became the first psychologist to earn a Nobel Prize for describing the new understanding.

Meanwhile, evolutionary psychology provided a new template for understanding the human mind. It evolved. We often see faces in clouds, but never see clouds in faces. We sometimes mistake a coiled garden hose or rope for a snake, but rarely mistake a snake for a garden hose. These tendencies, and many others like it, reflect our evolutionary history. The reproductive cost of jumping away from a coiled garden hose is very small. The reproductive cost of failing to recognize a dangerous snake is very high.

You do not think rationally, nor does anyone else. This is useful information, particularly if you have some understanding of how and why you -- and others -- think irrationally, and under what circumstances. It may seem too good to be true, but this book actually explains it to you, and does so entertainingly.

Even today, most economists believe that humans make rational economic choices. This is clearly false. Daniel Kahneman (and his collaborator, Amos Tversky) won their Nobel Prize, not in psychology -- there's no Nobel Prize category for that, but in economics. You ever wonder how we got stuck in this awful Great Recession, despite the brilliant insights of modern economists? It's because they are all wrong. This book will help you understand that better, while making you smile, laugh and nod your head with "Aha!" insights along the way.

Many psychotherapists believe, even today, that Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants correctly described "the unconscious." They believe that our childhood experiences, particularly psychosexual experiences, form the emotional and behavioral templates for the rest of our lives. We now know that most mental life is indeed unconscious. However, the templates of our mental lives were formed more by our common evolutionary history than our particular childhood experiences. That's why cognitive biases are human universals. If idiosyncratic childhood experience was the more important source of thinking templates, the cognitive biases described in You are Not So Smart would not be so robust and numerous.

You want to know yourself? Spending your life contemplating your potty training might help a little... or might not help at all. This book will help a whole lot more.

If you want to know yourself, start by studying your blind spots. Oops. Too bad. You can't find them with introspection because they are... blind spots! Good news, your blind spots are the same as other people's blind spots. They are human universals. So you can learn about them by studying all the recent scientific discoveries about human thinking, particularly all its irrational and unconscious features. The universal, irrational and unconscious landscape of human thinking is the topic of this book.

I previously described two well-known and rather obvious features -- faces in clouds versus clouds in faces and snakes versus garden hoses. This is very useful information.

Clouds vs faces: All humans have an "agency detection bias. We presume that things happen for reasons and that most things happen because an intelligent agent made them happen. Hence, ummm... Oh, I remember... Religion??!! Knowing this, next time a natural disaster occurs in a sinful city, you might be a little less inclined to attribute the event to an angry god. You might also recall that all cities are sinful.

Snakes vs. garden hoses: All humans have a hyper-sensitive immediate-danger-detector. The vast majority of alarms are false alarms. Not many citizens of industrialized nations die of snake bite, but many die or suffer from excessive worry and pointless fears. Understanding how false danger alarms work, you might be more able to live long and prosper.

Please excuse the irony. As I recall, the author does not actually discuss agency detection or danger detection bias. These are merely convenient examples of universally human cognitive biases that occurred to me was I was writing this review. They are easy to explain and intuitively obvious. You are Not So Smart discusses forty-eight others. He's chosen many of the really important and interesting phenomena. The list grows as research accumulates, and he probably didn't have room for all of them. Good news, he publishes periodic updates on his blog.

This book has a high speed to weight ratio. Every chapter describes a universal human cognitive bias, easily recognizable in your own experience. Chapters are just a few pages each. They do not need to be read in sequence. Though not simplistic, a smart eight grader could understand most of them; no scientific or psychological background is necessary. Yet these phenomena are not generally known, even by "smart" people. Thanks to this book, word will soon be getting around.

This book is one that you will breeze through quickly, and after nearly every page, want to tell every single person you know what you have learned. The citations of numerous psychology studies that really reveal an enormous amount about the way we think, why we think, and how we think, are illuminating, and I feel just a wee bit smarter by reading this book. In fact, I sincerely believe the world would be a much more incredible place if everyone in it read this book.

Not a five-star book, no. But so close! The chapters detailing scientific studies from neurologists and behavioral psychologists are, for this humanities guy, the meat of the book, and they make the book one I would recommend to anyone.
A weakness: long about the middle of the book, we get several chapters rehearsing the logical fallacies of rhetoric (things like the ad hominem argument, or the bias for false authorities), and these are much less interesting, less compelling, and certainly less fresh than what comes before or after. Perhaps without them, the book would have seemed too short, but they nearly derailed the book for me.
Another minor beef I had was that you can, at times, sense the author bending or massaging his data or his analysis to make subtle insinuations about whose politics are smart and whose politics are not. It becomes more overt near the end, and while I am certainly not outraged or offended that someone wants to suggest that smart politics tend to fall with one party and not the other, it wasn't the kind of move I tend to appreciate. (On the other hand, his interpretation of politics may flatter some readers, and they may like the book even better for that very reason... though wouldn't that itself be a cognitive bias?)
Also, I think too often, to make his point, the author makes it seem as if a bias in one direction equals a kind of knee-jerk determinism to act a certain way under certain conditions. That is to say, if people tend to do something under certain test conditions, the author extrapolates that they will pretty much always act that way in the real world. I was often reminded of the notion in Quantum Theory that observation affects reality. I'm not confident, in other words, that the way people behave in behavioral experiments at universities is identical to the way they behave when they aren't being observed, tested, asked to perform to produce data. A more honest approach might be to acknowledge that a tendency is just that, but hardly determinative or binding.
Yet to be fair, that would make the book a bit more timid and dull than it aspires to be. I kind of like the way that McRaney makes it all so vivid and clear. The subtlety the book lacks would make it all a bit more gray. I also love his sense of humor. Humor often relies on eliding nuances, so I am willing to forgive a lack of qualification to make room for a good joke.
This is the kind of book that I found myself constantly reading passages from to the wife (poor thing). It's almost always surprising and delightful.

This fantastic book should be the carry-on bag in the journey towards self-awareness for everybody. It exposes, with metaphors / examples / anecdotes/ easily-understood theories why our mind is a highly imperfect tool. Evolutionary, environmental, physiological and psychological factors nudge us to see the world in the way we like it to see. We ignore that most forecasts by Nostradamus did not make sense when only a couple of thousands make a bit of allegorical sense. We take golf advice from our dentists very seriously. We - even when we are the leaders - impose our opinion first in a setting thereby practically killing any voice of dissonance. We feel punishments are mostly karma, rewards are random luck. We feel way bitter when we lost $100 than we feel happy when we gain $200. When faced with an enormous crisis (impending air crash, say), majority of us 'freeze'. If we have flat tire, we often get help sooner if we are driving a desert roadway than if we were in the middle of a commute freeway. We are pathetically bad in estimating completion time of complex task (how long would it take for you to assemble the Ikea shelf?), especially if we are not the expert. We try to build an echo-chamber around us, searching and finding the messages that support our thoughts (I smoke. Churchill smoked. He lived long. QED).

This book is a breezy read and should be on everyone's shelf who ever interacts with her own mind.

This book is so shallow that you are better off not reading it at all. It simply adds to your illusion of knowing. The superficial interpretation of psychology leads to more misinformation than information. If you want to actually know how and why we think as we do, read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. (BTW, I am a professor of psychology.)

This is not a book about psychology: it is just a manual of rhetoric repackaged. It lists the most common fallacies, which you can find anywhere [...] and explains them using some of the most commonly-referred behavioral experiments that anyone can read in other (more serious books). Up to a point, the way he uses those experiments to explain the fallacies can be considered, in itself, a fallacy.

If you really want to understand how we think and how we delude ourselves (and the latest science behind it), please read the wonderful "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahenman, a profound and illuminating work. And if you want to learn about fallacies and rhetoric, there are many serious and better books to read (among them: "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student", by Corbett and Connors, or "An introduction to Reasoning", by Toulmin, Rieke and Janik).

At least the author is right in one aspect: after reading this book, I certainly feel I am not so smart for buying it.

This is a fast and easy read meant to make the reader reflect a little bit. I didn't find any new or life-changing information here, but it is well-executed, purposeful and entertaining. Another reviewer suggested that this was a good bathroom reader, which I think is a great way to put it. The longest chapters are only several pages, and the information is presented so as to be accessible for all types of readers.

Don't let the title scare you - the author isn't condescending. The chapter endings (with their words of wisdom) got a little old, but the writing was mostly good.

Don't read this expecting profound insights into your psyche or involved studies about the human mind. The topics are covered briefly and with broad strokes. Many of the studies that were mentioned in this book I had already heard of, which is surprising because I don't read much about psychology or sociology (I'm thinking they must've been described on Penn & Teller's "Bull*#&@."). Also, at first glance many of the studies sound flawed, or at best insufficient to prove the writer's point. I think some of that just comes from the fact that this is not a psychology textbook, so not much is said about the number of subjects tested or in what conditions, which I understand would inhibit the book's readability and limit its scope.

I recommend this as a light read, most appropriate for people with little knowledge of psychology. This would be good to give as a gift (maybe for a younger person still defining himself) or get from the library. You probably won't feel compelled to highlight phrases or write in the margins, but you might find a nugget to turn over in your mind and help you understand your relationship with the world.

I have read only a third of the book so far. Some of the subject matter is interesting and has common sense backing it. While some of it is from the authors own delusions. He will explain why believing one thing to be true is deluding yourself, then a few chapters later, while explaining another, his example will be a delusion he described in the previous chapter. When one thing is bad in one chapter, but yet good in another, doesn't that make you double minded?
His commercial and sales pitch gets you interested, but if I had known what I know now, I would have tried to get it from a library...... Save myself money.

Based on the blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart hits the highlights of logical fallacies in an entertaining and engaging light. Every chapter is a reminder of how easily we can fool ourselves and each other. At turns revelatory and mind-blowing, this is a quick and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Unfortunately, it's more of an anthology than a treatise: it feels like--because it is--a collection of blog posts. It commits most of the sins that you get from an anthology. There is no unifying, consistent voice, the occasionally salty language undermines the often quite technical subject matter. Every chapter is an autonomous unit of information, and almost every chapter invokes the title of the book. This works in the blog, as the entries are meant to be cohesive and yet stand alone, but the completed work suffers for it.

Thankfully, the book does not suffer too badly from anthology-bloat. If anything, there's room for more. It's only about 65,000 words, and the last 10% is bibliography. And it gets a little sloppy in some places, using examples that don't quite line up, failing to recognize idea cross-pollination. What it needed (but failed) to do was structure itself in such a way that concepts built on each other and grouped by similarity and added up to a cohesive picture of humanity. But yeah, just re-labeling entries as "chapters" was probably easier.

So, while good, this book could have benefited immensely from some information organization, as well as some sterilization, formalization, and standardization of the language. It could have been a mind-blowing necessary addition to your library. Instead, it's perhaps the most essential bathroom reader of 2011.