Review by New York Times Review
A little after midnight, while writing this review, I took a break to get some beer from my local supermarket. As I stood in line the lights suddenly dimmed throughout the store. I must have looked puzzled. "We do that because less people come in this late," the clerk explained. "There are fewer customers, so we need less light?" I asked. "Correct," he said. His non sequitur had me leaving the store fortified with both a six-pack and the reinforced conviction that books on how to think should be required reading in high schools across the country. "Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking," by the psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, and "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction," by the psychologist Philip E. Tetlock and the journalist Dan Gardner, are two such books. The six sections of "Mindware" offer a variety of perspectives on how we think: the role of the unconscious in our judgments and decisions; the lessons of behavioral economics; the principles of probability and statistics; recommendations for how to test your ideas; and two sections on reasoning and the nature of knowledge. Nisbett is famous for his groundbreaking work in several areas of psychology; Malcolm Gladwell called him "the most influential thinker in my life." And so a book from Nisbett on this important subject is bound to be met with high expectations. My verdict is mixed. If you are looking for a survey of the topics covered in the book's six sections, this is a good one. You'll learn about our overzealousness to see patterns, our hindsight bias, our loss aversion, the illusions of randomness and the importance of the scientific method, all in under 300 pages of text. But there isn't much in "Mindware" that is new, and if you've read some of the many recent books on the unconscious, randomness, decision making and pop economics, then the material covered here will be familiar to you. Nisbett writes clearly, and he takes his time with difficult concepts ranging from multiple regression (which answers the question, Given many variables that contribute to some outcome, what is the effect of each?) to dialectical reasoning (a method of argument for resolving opposing views in order to establish truth). But the dry tone of the book, along with Nisbett's practice of telling us what he is going to say and reiterating what he has just said, gives "Mindware" a textbook feel. Where "Mindware" addresses the issue of making sense of a complex world from many angles, "Superforecasting" focuses on one issue: how we form theories of what will happen in the future. "Superforecasting" is a sequel of sorts to Tetlock's 2005 book "Expert Political Judgment," in which he analyzed 82,361 predictions made by 284 experts in fields like political science, economics and journalism. He found that about 15 percent of events they claimed had little or no chance of happening did in fact happen, while about 27 percent of those labeled sure things didn't. Tetlock concluded that the experts did little better than a "dart-throwing chimp." The primate metaphor resurfaces in this new book. The authors single out Thomas Friedman of The New York Times for being an "exasperatingly evasive" forecaster, and they point to the inaccuracy of financial pundits at CNBC, whose performance prompted Jon Stewart to remark, "If I'd only followed CNBC's advice, I'd have a million dollars today - provided I'd started with a hundred million dollars." But unlike "Mindware," most of the material in "Superforecasting" is new, and includes a compendium of best practices for prediction. The book describes the findings of the Good Judgment Project, an effort started by Tetlock and his collaborator (and wife), Barbara Meilers, in 2011, which was funded by an arm of the American intelligence community. National security agencies have an obvious interest in Tetlock's project. By one estimate, the United States has 20,000 intelligence analysts working full time to assess issues like the probability of an Israeli sneak attack on Iran in the next month, or the departure of Greece from the eurozone by the end of the year. That is nearly four times the number of physics faculty at American research universities. And so money spent on improving results must have seemed like a good investment. It was. The Good Judgment Project used the Internet to recruit 2,800 volunteers, ordinary people with an interest in current affairs - a retired computer programmer, a social services worker, a homemaker. Over four years, the researchers asked them to employ public news and information sources to estimate the probability that various events would occur, posing nearly 500 questions of the sort intelligence analysts must answer every day. The volunteers were also asked to reaffirm or adjust those probabilities daily, until a question "expired" at a pre-announced closing date. Some of the volunteers performed strikingly better than the pack. Tetlock and Meilers studied their strategies, and what they learned about the thinking and methodology of these "superforecasters" is the heart of what is presented in the book. The central lessons of "Superforecasting" can be distilled into a handful of directives. Base predictions on data and logic, and try to eliminate personal bias. Keep track of records so that you know how accurate you (and others) are. Think in terms of probabilities and recognize that everything is uncertain. Unpack a question into its component parts, distinguishing between what is known and unknown, and scrutinizing your assumptions. Those lessons are hardly surprising, though the accuracy that ordinary people regularly attained through their meticulous application did amaze me. Unfortunately, few of us seem to follow these principles in our daily lives. The prescriptions in both "Superforecasting" and "Mindware" should offer us all an opportunity to understand and react more intelligently to the confusing world around us. LEONARD MLODINOW is the author of "The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos" and "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 18, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Psychologist Nisbett wants you to know that we can, if we really want to, train ourselves to think more clearly and analytically. There's a whole box of tools available to us. Drawing from a variety of disciplines science, philosophy, psychology, economics, and statistical analysis, among them the author shows us how to apply their principles to our daily lives. For example, from economics, he demonstrates how we can apply a cost/benefit analysis when we're faced with making a difficult choice; from statistical analysis, we learn how to assign the proper weight to the various options in a complex situation (some things are more likely than others; some potential decisions carry more implications than others). The book is full of helpful hints: pay attention to context; question why we believe things; remember that correlation is not causation; and, perhaps most important of all, remember that our assumptions are often wrong. Nisbett's goal is to help us look at problems and choices in new ways, to attack them from new analytic angles, to find clarity out of chaos. No psychological self-help book succeeds completely, but this one comes close.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Psychology professor Nisbett (Intelligence and How to Get It) again makes a challenging topic accessible in this witty exploration of common errors in thinking (e.g., mistaking correlation for causation). Nisbett challenges long-held assumptions and patterns of thought, having "compared people's reasoning to scientific, statistical, and logical standards and found large classes of judgments to be systematically mistaken." Most readers will emerge with a far better understanding of why they make the errors that they do, and perhaps how to avoid them. Nisbett capably presents dense material in digestible form; statistical analysis will never be child's play, but it's hard to imagine someone doing a better job in explaining the tools it has to offer everyone, and how to employ them. His frequent use of anecdotes from his own life, such as the friend who had to weigh the pros and cons of a job switch, aids comprehension, and he also offers ways of interpreting conflicting scientific (and pseudoscientific) findings. Agent: Katinka Matson and John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Nisbett (psychology, Univ. of Michigan; Intelligence and How To Get It) immerses his readers in a great depth of knowledge but with such clear teaching and precise examples that they will enjoy the exercise and the result. This sophisticated text connects with so much of our everyday and long-term experience that readers come to understand research design and scientific method. -Nisbett uses tools associated with economics as well as psychology: one chapter is "Coding, Counting, Correlation and Causality." Topics range from diet and smoking to education (class size, teacher quality), dietary supplements (these are much used, though there is no evidence of benefit), voting, and green environments. He cautions that faulty MRA (multiple regression analysis) glorifies erroneous conclusions. "If there's bias, the bigger the data, the harder the fall." Nisbett, who has a sense of humor and a measure of humility, steps on some respectable economists' toes as he clarifies fine points of reasoning, measuring tools, subjects of study, and interpretation of results. VERDICT A must for libraries, a joy to own and mark up, a great gift of enlightenment from an expert and exemplary teacher. The section on Logic and Dialectical Reasoning, comparing cultures East and West, rewards readers who can accept uncertainty as the cost of deeper insight.-E. James -Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
