[PDF] The Art of Thinking Clearly

The Art of Thinking Clearly is a 2013 Self help book by the Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli which describes in short chapters 99 of the most common thinking errors – ranging from cognitive biases to envy and social distortions.

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.

The Art of Thinking Clearly : Better thinking, Better decision PDF

Author(s): Rolf Dobelli

Publisher: Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd), Year: 2013

ISBN: 9781444759549

(1.7 MB)

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The Art of Thinking Clearly PDF