The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli

May 2014 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this ebook

A world-class thinker counts the 100 ways in which humans behave irrationally, showing us what we can do to recognize and minimize these “thinking errors” to make better decisions and have a better life

Despite the best of intentions, humans are notoriously bad—that is, irrational—when it comes to making decisions and assessing risks and tradeoffs. Psychologists and neuroscientists refer to these distinctly human foibles, biases, and thinking traps as “cognitive errors.” Cognitive errors are systematic deviances from rationality, from optimized, logical, rational thinking and behavior. We make these errors all the time, in all sorts of situations, for problems big and small: whether to choose the apple or the cupcake; whether to keep retirement funds in the stock market when the Dow tanks, or whether to take the advice of a friend over a stranger.

The “behavioral turn” in neuroscience and economics in the past twenty years has increased our understanding of how we think and how we make decisions. It shows how systematic errors mar our thinking and under which conditions our thought processes work best and worst. Evolutionary psychology delivers convincing theories about why our thinking is, in fact, marred. The neurosciences can pinpoint with increasing precision what exactly happens when we think clearly and when we don’t.

Drawing on this wide body of research, The Art of Thinking Clearly is an entertaining presentation of these known systematic thinking errors--offering guidance and insight into everything why you shouldn’t accept a free drink to why you SHOULD walk out of a movie you don’t like it to why it’s so hard to predict the future to why shouldn’t watch the news. The book is organized into 100 short chapters, each covering a single cognitive error, bias, or heuristic. Examples of these concepts include: Reciprocity, Confirmation Bias, The It-Gets-Better-Before-It-Gets-Worse Trap, and the Man-With-A-Hammer Tendency. In engaging prose and with real-world examples and anecdotes, The Art of Thinking Clearly helps solve the puzzle of human reasoning.

Ratings and reviews

I loved it. For those who might complain that the chapters are way too summarized, the author offers more than 50 pages detailing every possible source of information that he used, so there is no excuse for not enjoying the subjects and strategies provided. It definitely feels like a very functional book, as we can read and have fun as well as start applying the concepts provided. Moreover, it was through this book that I had the opportunity to be presented to many other authors and professionals that only now I can say I look forward to read as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

This is a mishmash of a psychology first-year course, freakonomics, and the Black swan..... This book is worth reading if you're never going to read the original sources, but they are far better then this.

It's a lot to absorb but practicing a few tips at a time can get you started. Some ideas have proven my thinking processes to be both logical and illogical, which I can embrace because I know I want to be better and more wise everyday.

About the author

Rolf Dobelli is a bestselling writer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Zurich.Minds, a community of some of the world's most famed and distinguished thinkers, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs, and a cofounder of getAbstract, the world's largest publisher of compressed knowledge. He lives in Lucerne, Switzerland.