Enjoyable crash course on cognitive biases
I avoid self-help books like the plague, and my initial impression of The Art of Thinking Clearly was the same.
Fortunately, even my contempt for self-help books does not prevent me from an objective assessment of my labelling, if the book were to come into my hands. During a visit to a local bookstore, I happened to come across this book and remembering the praises of a friend of mine, proceeded to skim through the contents page.
There are certain kinds of reference books that any decent library should have. These may not be the best books in their field, but their trademark is their appositeness on two counts.
Firstly, the method of finding something within the book is easy to follow, even if actually finding it may take time. For example, the method of finding a word in a dictionary is very clear, even if you may take some time to find a specific word if there are over two thousand pages.
Secondly, they give clear and concise answers when you have found what you are looking for, thus minimising the time needed to understand the idea and get on with one’s work.
Dobelli does an excellent job on the second count, and an above average one on the first. Covering nearly a hundred such biases, Dobelli writes straight to the point and devotes around three pages to each bias. His examples, so far as I could figure out, are optimally chosen – sufficiently detailed as to properly explain the cognitive bias and not miss the woods for the trees.
However, there are a few idiosyncrasies which I particularly disliked.
He frequently quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of books like Fooled by Randomness and Antifragile. In fact this happened so often that at some points I felt I was reading the footnotes or the appendices of some Taleb book, and that The Art of Thinking Clearly was actually a decoy used by Taleb to popularise his own work.
The same applies to the (lesser) frequent references to Charlie Munger.
Secondly, over the course of the ninety-nine cognitive biases and behavioural aspects, certain examples, and even phrases, appear repeatedly. This could be because these pieces were originally written for weekly columns in certain German, Dutch and Swiss newspapers and were only later compiled into a book.
All in all, The Art of Thinking Clearly is a useful addition to one’s library for quick reference purposes, though you will need to refer to other resources if you want to know about a given cognitive bias in more detail.