I recently completed reading The Art of Thinking Clearly (link) by Rolf Dobelli. I found the book an interesting, concise and useful read on the many biases of the human mind.

If you go through the reviews of the book on Goodreads (link) or anywhere else online, you are likely to end up with mixed reviews. The negative ones mostly criticizing the author of plagiarism. In fact, N.N. Taleb, the bestselling author of many books including The Black Swan (link) has gone ahead and written a detailed account of the instances where his ideas were plagiarized by Dobelli – link.

Interestingly, these happen to be the exact reasons why I ended up reading Dobelli’s book! Let me explain myself a bit here though that would mean slightly digressing from the subject of this post.

Reading Summary Books

On multiple accounts, I had considered buying books such as Taleb’s The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness (link) or Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (link) etc. to understand more about the human mind and it’s blind spots. Each time, the sheer size of these books have made me put off the task to a distant future.

It might very well be the case that these books (among others) were the first ones to discuss many of the ideas mentioned in Dobelli’s book and that they discuss these ideas with much more rigor. But for a casual reader like me who is looking for a high-level overview of the core essence of these books without taking the actual effort of reading these, books like Dobelli’s are the best options.

On a related note, I recently came across this extremely nice Youtube channel – link that takes this concept of reading summaries a step further by presenting 5-10 minute illustrative videos that summarise the essence of various famous self-help/philosophical books.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Getting back to the book, there were two other negative points mentioned in the reviews that I was careful to watch out for while reading:

1. In an effort to come up with ‘100‘ limitations of the human mind, Dobelli has added many somewhat obvious/insignificant ones also to the list. This can make the real insights hard to separate out for the casual reader esp. since they are given in no particular order.
2.  Some of the anecdotes used are contextually inappropriate.

Keeping all these in mind, I’ve been able to get some good insights out of the book. A few of the ones that come to my mind include (not including bias definitions for brevity):

• Confirmation bias (link) being the mother of all biases. This explains why you will never be able to convince someone in arguments where the topic has inherent uncertainties which are open to interpretations. Political discussions on the internet seem to be a good example.
• Swimmer’s Body Illusion (link) – Also answers the question ‘Does Harvard make you smarter?’
• Action Bias (link) – where we feel doing something is more productive than doing nothing, even though what we do might be counter-productive.
• Effort Justification (link) – where we tend to value something acquired with more effort as more valuable rather than objectively valuing the utility of the item.
• Illusion of Attention (link) – This one was an eye-opener. Particularly the observation that drivers talking on the phone are as susceptible to accidents as a drunken driver, even if you are on hands-free.
• Survivorship Bias (link) – probably explains why people fail to understand the risks involved in starting startups and overestimate the chances of success.
• Forer Bias (link) –  refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.

The entire list of biases can be found here – link.