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Inevitable Illusions (by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini)
The full title of that book is "Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds". It is a book about how easily us humans fall into cognitive traps and can hardly escape them upon repetition. Everybody knows the common examples of optical illusions, but this book goes much farther. It explains how humans are generally incapable of making good estimations of probability or how we are incapable of making a rational decision although we try hard to do so. The author of the book takes us through numerous examples and explanations showing us the frighteningly weak side of our "rational reasoning" using a new psychological discipline called "cognitive sciences".
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn what mistakes he will make day in and day out, because at least being aware of the problem will make you feel less secure and thus will make you doubt your own decisions more. My favorite example from the book is something I had come across in high-school math. Take a class of 24 students. How high is the probability of two of them celebrating their birthday on the same day in any given year? Amazingly, this probability is more than 50%. (Short explanation by Brad DeLong here.) The main learning I have gathered from that example and which got reinforced a lot by this whole book: Probabilities are not for the faint of heart. Don't trust your own sense of probabilities. Never. Not even if they seem extremely obvious.
Other than having a really good topic and some very new insights, I found the book to be overly complicated in its language, frequently indulging into self-reference, and quite cumbersome in the end. Case after case is offered for the astonishment of the reader (which works), but I found the explanations part to be not very well structured.Inevitable Illusions, after all, is a good book with insights you will have a hard time forgetting and which managers all over the world should be aware of. Endure the writing style, and the insights are yours.
- Book Title: Inevitable Illusions : How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds
- Book Author: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
- Buy the book at Amazon.com or Amazon.de
- My rating:
