Thinking Better

I may have been quoting from this book for many months now but I have recently finished it. In the beginning I thought it would be a work of popular science (the sort I can understand, in other words) but rapidly worked out that it had many more secrets to give out if I read it as advised on the jacket 'slowly'.

I wish I had been handed this book on starting out in adult life and told that a week reading it would make me richer and wiser. It would have.

I am not going to review it. I am going to say that you should buy it and read it.

And here are some things I have learned:

• There are ways of asking a question that make yes more probable.

• We are naturally lazy thinkers. We should, at minimum, develop awareness of the sort of situations where we might intuit the wrong answer.

• The curse of 'manager of the month' awards is simply regression to the mean.

• Anchoring shapes answers. If I ask you if the world's tallest building is higher or lower than 2,000 feet then ask you how tall it is I will generally get a higher answer than if I ask you if it is taller than 1,000 feet, first.

• We over-assess the risk of events that have recently occurred.

• We are risk-averse. No-one should take out any extended warranties if they have more than three appliances that might qualify. Put the premium saved in your own appliance-replacement-fund instead.

• To demolish a case, raise doubts about the strongest favourable arguments. To discredit a witness, focus on the weakest part of the testimony.

• Beware of outcome bias. We are poor at calling to mind non-events (times when things didn't happen).

• Algorithms outperform experts but this is probably not what Michael Gove was getting at.

• We tend to anticipate more regret than we will probably feel.

• Do not passively accept the way decision problems are framed.

• We have organisations because their checks and balances ensure fewer mistakes than individuals would make. Which is why Trump will probably kill us all if left unchecked.

The two papers cited by the Nobel Prize Committee are fully reproduced as appendices. They are completely readable for any one who has made it to the end of the book. Indeed the author comments that we may be '...surprised by how simple they are.'

I love experts who can explain their expertise simply.