How does one think clearly? Based on the 99 or so biases listed down in each of the chapter of The Art of Thinking Clearly, it is to remove all biases and think absolutely objectively. For most, this is an impossible task as biases are more deeply engrained than the memory of that time you finished all the Christmas pudding and you blamed it on the fat kid but nobody believed you.
And for most, these biases are such a common sense thing that it’s foolish to even think about them again. Didn’t we learn about these human weaknesses in psychology 101 or management marketing 101? Didn’t they hammer down Maslow’s hierarchy of need until we forget about everything else that we learned? Yeah, probably. But I guess not everybody has a college education you pretentious twat, and for some, knowing the simplest of these biases could have a major impact on their lives, even though you know it to be common sense.
For example, the authority bias states that experts may not be as reliable as you think they are, or your boss for that matter (but not my boss, the dude is pretty bang on). Or even the chapter on simple logic, which is exactly as it sounds. It seems that people lack common sense these days and logic is as endangered as the Sumatran tiger. Or procrastination. We know that it’s terrible, but it has to be mentioned here, as it is part of the human weakness.
But I did pick up a few things from this book that I found useful. Among my highlights:
- Omission bias: Inaction that will lead to an unwanted consequence that you’ve already unforeseen, but you do nothing about anyway. Red flags anyone?
- Zeigarnik effect: We only store things in our memory only if it serves us for the purpose. Once the memory has served its purpose, we wipe it out of our memory. As a project manager, this is why we need to document everything.
- Default effect: In general, people will not question what is presented to them as default, even though this default selection may not be the optimum selection.
- Ellsberg Paradox: We favour known probabilities over unknown probabilities, even though the unknown probability might actually be more favourable. This is also called ambiguity aversion.
- Incentive Super Response Tendency: People might actually do more damage over positive incentives, if it is too lucrative. For example, farmers break down fossil bones in China to increase the quantity, as the authorities rewarded finders on a per piece basis.
- Chauffeur Knowledge: Those who seem to be in the know and present their ideas well may only have a limited scope of knowledge, which is what they present. They don’t necessary have a deep understanding of the concept itself.
Of course, there are biases over here which seems a bit off. For every example, there are often contradictory example why the bias does not help you in real life situations. For example, in the Fallacy of the Single Cause, Dobelli argued that different factors can be attributed to a consequence instead of a single cause. Though this may be wise, sometimes there really is just a single cause to why something happens. Or in Information Bias, where an excess of data can lead to bad decisions — sometimes there will be situations where the excess of data can lead to important findings, such as when Microsoft found a hack from the mountains of errors that they compiled into a data swamp.
Regardless of the contradictory examples, The Art of Thinking Clearly is easy to digest. It is as anecdotal as the most popular business books, whether you see this as a good thing or a bad thing. Each chapter is less than three pages, which is the strength and weakness of the book — the three pages allow Dobelli to fit in the amount of content of the list of human defects (yes, that’s you!), but conversely, we’re not going to remember all the 99 defects unless you memorise this book back to front.
I’ve got other things to read, like Amy Poehler complaining about her defects and consequences in her autobiographical “Yes Please!” Sure, it’s not the same genre, or belonging even in the same shelf, but I find her real life examples as useful as the best of Dobelli’s research examples that he included in the book.
