The mathematics of problem-solving—always ingenious and often helpful.
A mathematician explains how to deal with the world.
Sumpter, a professor of applied mathematics and the author of Ten Equations That Rule the World, writes that our thinking as we navigate life can be classified as either statistical (or stable), periodic, chaotic, or complex. Making his approach as simple as possible, the author divides the book into four sections, one for each category of thought. The first section may seem like the easiest, but statistics can be misleading or even meaningless. In his discussion of periodic thinking, one of his anecdotes involves Adam Smith. A professor explained to him that Smith “had been wrong, because his stable thinking had convinced him that the market would reach and stay at equilibrium. But Smith’s thinking was, Parker said, reductionist. Accounting for our interactions, the way we also behaved like animal herds, showed that human society was anything but stable.” Perhaps the most startling category, chaos as a mathematical and scientific entity is a 20th-century discovery. (For more on the science of chaos, turn to Peter Gleick’s groundbreaking 1987 book, Chaos.) As Sumpter demonstrates, chaos is not the same as total confusion, but rather a specific natural phenomenon in which tiny changes in initial conditions lead to enormous unpredictable effects. This is why, no matter how much information computers can gather about weather conditions today, predictions beyond a week are unreliable. Unlike the previous three, complex thinking is less about solutions than “finding the stories which help us to better understand ourselves, as well as those around us.” Despite the upbeat conclusion, Sumpter has not written a self-improvement guide or another how-to-lie-with-statistics knockoff. Rather, he offers a fairly clearheaded popular mathematics survey that will appeal to readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and similar books.
The mathematics of problem-solving—always ingenious and often helpful.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781250806260
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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