Mindware

This book really had me captivated all the way through. I find psychology to be very interesting. The book is about the limitations and shortcomings of our thinking, and how we are generally unaware of just how shaky our everyday conclusions are. The book goes into detail about the split between our conscious and unconscious processing of events, and how much of what is behind the scenes in the formation of our perceptions is unavailable to us. In the later chapters you get a nice "course" on statistics and and great information on theories of logic. These serve as a contrast to the overconfident and less than rational methods of thought most of us are prone to. I say "course" on statistics because this is nothing like the torture you may have endured or would have anticipated from a college course on statistics (I happen to enjoy statistics but I march to the beat of my own drum). Instead, you get a very easily understandable explanation of how claims like "people who have larger wedding ceremonies are more likely to stay married" are not what they're sometimes cracked up to be (namely that even if that statement is true, it does not necessarily mean that having a large ceremony will improve your chances of staying married longer. It may be that the people who have larger ceremonies do so because they have more money, and therefore have less fights over finances, and/or less stress, and/or better access to counseling services. The name given to this notion is "correlation does not equal causation"). To sum it up, this book looks at human thought, it various pitfalls, and ways to improve it from several angles. If you've read Thinking...Fast and Slow or Predictably Irrational, or similar books, this one may have a similar feel, and it may re-iterate some of the things you learned in those books. However, it does offer much information not contained in those books, and it is a much easier read than some of them. Thinking...Fast and Slow was, for me, a very interesting book but a little dry in parts. I can say that not one chapter of this book was dry in the least. I walked away from it quite satisfied and consider it money well spent.

The fact that the mind has ingrained mechanisms for understanding itself and the world around it has rarely been better explained than in Richard Nisbett’s Mindware. The consequences of following these heuristics, and how insights from psychology, economics and statistics can help to overcome them, are an important new branch of human knowledge and should be learned by every undergraduate. But this book stops at the level of the typical college student. While undoubtedly useful for educating older teens, those of us privileged to work in these or related fields will find little to no new information in this work. There is some discussion of the author’s own work in the difference modes of perception found in the East and West but this too tends to mostly repeat well known cultural attributes such as wholistic versus individualistic thinking. In short, Mindware would be an excellent gift for those about to enter college. But it offers little new to those already cognizant of heuristics and their tendency to result in biases. Perhaps the book was only intended for such a audience but it would have been useful to know this before purchasing. Highly recommended for introducing young people to replacing naive intuition with a more scientific approach. Those already well informed will find, however, that this book merely scratches the surface on this increasingly important topic.

My impression after having read some other books in this modern psychology genre, such as those by Kahneman, Haidt, Ariley, etc., is this book adds something new, and has it's own focus. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who likes other books in the genre, or even someone looking for a first book of that type. Some of the ideas and examples in the book are arguably oversimplified, perhaps more so in the earlier parts in the book. However, I think the author purposely intended to use some simplified examples in order to illustrate a particular points. This may be to help develop intuitions about the basic concepts on the part of readers new to some of material. Personally, I am in favor of explicit disclaimers about using simplified examples lest criticism arise that the examples are wrong. This is similar to observing, “All models are wrong, but that doesn't mean some models aren't useful over a range of particular domains,” or something more specific to that effect. As one type of example, even Newton's law of gravity is an approximation with some assumptions tied to it. In the case of this book, some approximations could be fairly obvious to many people. This could lead to concern that the book is misleading. Here's how I see it, the book is in significant part about motivating the reader to being open to seeing that cognitive biases, heuristics, and other sometimes quirky characteristics of human thought are real and that the reader has them just like everybody else, and that there is reason to want to want to alleviate some of that to the extent reasonably possible in practical everyday life. To that end, Nisbett offers a few rules of thumb in italics at the end of each chapter. He could have just listed the rules and skipped the rest, but people not already familiar with bias and heuristics, etc., would not likely be convinced to bother trying to take up the rules. In addition, more towards the end of the book, the material discusses more complex issues where simple examples alone aren't enough to make the points clear. In those cases, the text is more of an explanatory nature.

The the chorus goes a lot better with the book. But it's written well and it's a good Refresher if you had a lot of Statistics or probability or critical thinking but there are some new ideas that are good. The teacher he is an excellent teacher and a good writer so the book is easy to read well-written I recommend it.

Highly recommended book for anyone. Read it, forget, read it again from time to time. Teaches more about how to think than any school

It's amazing how a book like this isn't just common sense. Too many times, very intelligent people don't acknowledge their blindspots. They've constructed their belief systems on very fragile foundations and personal anecdotes. This is a great book I know I'll be rereading and revisiting.

This is the book I have spent years waiting for and it could only have been written by someone blessed with the laudable insight and scholarship of the author, Richard Nesbitt. Why do I value it so highly? This book amounts to a distillation of all the faculties and processes that are vital to our functioning as intelligent citizens of the world. Many books have laid claim -- usually on their behalf by people of high status --to achieving education's ultimate goal, to genuinely equip us to navigate the logical, philosophical and psychological hazards prone to bedevil even the best thinkers. Unlike so many pretenders, this one actually ascends to the throne. One could waste years studying arcane languages and moralistic fables and many of us, sadly, have done so.. Alternatively, one can read this book, take its ideas on board, commit them to memory and thereby attain that ever-elusive quality: wisdom.

For those who has a real interest in research methodology, grab this, its a full Monty...

Amazing thinking techniques for making every day decision making a bit more. Helps redefine some some theories on decision making and magnifies the flawless in some of these theories.