Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Artificial intelligence expert Hofstadter (Gîdel, Escher, Bach, not reviewed, etc.) challenges conventional computer simulations of reasoning. These simulations don't begin to match the richness and flexibility of human thought, Hofstadter says: They're either ``brute force'' performances that simply take advantage of the computer's speed in considering already established options or programs that provide limited information that leads to a foregone conclusion. As an alternative, Hofstadter and his students create computer programs that model anagrams and analogies (remember those SAT questions: ``A is to B as C is to ...''?) as examples of human thinking and creativity. They create programs that allow the computer to search and discover candidates for the missing terms chosen from a ``coderack'' (Hofstadter loves puns). They also allow for ``slippage''—deviation from strict rules, which is what Hofstadter means by ``fluid concepts'' (for example, what is the solution to ``ABC is to XYZ as ABD is to ...?). Reading Hofstadter gives clues to how people—and presumably his computer programs- -slip around these barriers to come up with answers that are described variously as ``happy,'' ``low temperature,'' or ``urged'' with certain ``pressures.'' Hofstadter's admittedly complex writing style also has a wonderful colloquialism: You can hear him talking to his students, in part to get his own thoughts straight in the process. Reading this compendium of articles on games he and his AI researchers have programmed leads to consideration of human thought processes. In contrast to the programs of others in the field, Hofstadter's games are modest, played within small ``domains.'' But they open up ideas on how perception and concept formation are linked in parallel processing tracks in the brain. For Hofstadter, the art of programming a computer is not an end in itself but a means to further understanding the mind at work. An excellent and updated review of a major trailblazer's spin on AI. (Library of Science dual main selection)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-05154-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
A well-aimed blast at the recovered memory movement that exposes the roots of false memory syndrome and the reasons for the acceptance and persistence of the phenomenon. Wassil-Grimm, a writer and media commentator on family psychology (How To Avoid Your Parent's Mistakes When You Raise Your Children, not reviewed) outlines the dispute between those who believe claims that forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse can be recovered and those who reject claims of such recovered memories as false. She effectively demolishes the arguments, especially the statistics, of the believers, and urges all therapists to look critically at their assumptions and methods. Wassil-Grimm has mastered the exposÇ and self-help formulas, that is, she writes clearly, includes lots of case studies loaded with human interest to reinforce her arguments, and hammers them home by ending each chapter with a concise summary of the points made in it. There are helpful lists of tips for therapists, for those in or seeking therapy, and for the families of those falsely accused of sexual abuse. Throughout the book she raises the question of why anyone would believe they'd been sexually abused by a parent if it were not true, and each time she returns to the question she provides an additional answer. Thus she is able to conclude with a list of 16 persuasive explanations. Two related phenomena—the willingness of many therapists to believe quite fantastic reports of recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse and the startling increase in reports by therapists of patients with multiple personality disorder (considered a psychological defense against abuse)—come under Wassil-Grimm's skeptical eye. This is a welcome addition to recent literature on the subject (see Making Monsters, p. 1105, and The Myth of Repressed Memory, p. 908). Strongly recommended. Succeeds both as an exposÇ of a dangerous fad and as a survival guide for its victims.
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-87951-572-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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