The Art of Thinking Clearly - A Review
If there is one skill I would like to improve in time on this earth, it is thinking well. Our affections and our actions follow what we think. Additionally, in the information-saturated world in which we live, individuals and companies are spending billions of dollars every year to keep us from thinking well.
In this quest to think better, I picked up Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly. The title makes it sound like it has some methods to clearer cognition, but as Dobelli announces in the introduction, “This is not a how-to book.” Instead, it is an illuminated list of biases and fallacies that people commonly buy into.
This book falls into the category that I like to categorize as “airport books.” These are the trade books that you will see if you browse one of the bookstores or newsstands in any American airport. The writing is clear, with simple language and frequent illustrations, but usually very skimmable. The chapters tend to be short and well titled so that one can pop in and out easily or simply skip some chapters and still understand the main flow. The books are designed to be read in about the time it takes to wait for and endure a domestic flight. The content is usually something in the self-improvement vein (usually with a business bias), alternative view of history, or interesting but lesser-known aspect of humanity.
Authors of this genre of book include Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, Bill Bryson, Nassim Taleb and others. They are usually popularizers whose gift is in researching a topic, synthesizing some of the ideas, and writing about in a captivating way. Some of the books are quite good, and some even include very helpful ideas, but they are always derivative, typically non-controversial, and intended to make the reader look and sound more well-informed than he or she really is.
As I’ve fallen into a well of these books while reading on various topics, I’ve also come to discover that there is a lot of self-reference within the genre. For example, Dobelli probably should have listed Taleb as a contributor to his volume, given how frequently he cites him. There are many instances of each of them citing each other—whether in print or a Ted Talk someone else gives. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, it’s simply something that is evident when you read a clump of the books published around the same time.
Dobelli’s book is helpful in many ways. Each of the ninety-nine chapters covers a distinct error in thinking or method of misrepresentation we ought to watch out for. He tells us to watch out for mistakes in true remembrances, the paralysis of excessive options, attempts to attribute attitudes to an author based on characters in their novel, the psychological effect of scarcity, and more. There really area lot of different ways that we can think incorrectly and there is value in understanding how we might get tricked, so we can watch out for it.
The book seems to take a humanitarian approach by offering for the cost of a restaurant meal tips that could change your life and improve society. But the nature of social improvement is not entirely altruistic. As Dobelli notes, “If we could learn to recognize and evade the biggest errors in thinking––in our private lives, at work, or in government––we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity––all we need is less irrationality.”
Of course, what exactly constitutes irrationality in Dobelli’s mind? He does not state it, but it is clear from the text that he writes that irrationality is assumed to be any belief or idea that does not reduce all value to instrumentality and all reality to the material.
When considering causality, he dismisses the possibility of the supernatural. Those who believe in God’s intervention have simply been fooled by the randomness of the world and pieced together a fairy tale based on ignoring the details. At another point he dismisses as foolish someone holding onto a car he had refurbished when selling off possessions to pay a debt. There can be no value other than the dollar value in his mind.
None of these views are surprising. They are not atypical. However, they reflect the biases of his own thinking, which oddly enough he does not highlight as one of the fallacies. They are reflective of how people need to continually interrogate the baseline assumptions of authors as they read a book. Having assumptions does not invalidate the contents of a volume or its arguments, but it can inform us and help readers sift through the wheat and the chaff.
Overall, this was a useful book. It can serve as a reference when trying to label errors in thinking that we witness. It may also provide fodder for discussions of clear and critical thinking. Whether it will result in a jump in prosperity, as Dobelli hopes, is less clear. However, it will certainly provide an amusing way to spend a few hours, if one has the time.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.