A Joosr Guide to... The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

23 Pages·2015·0.23 MB·English

THE ART OF THINKING CLEARLY
BY ROLF DOBELLI
Better Thinking, Better Decisions
Contents
What’s it about?
Our emotions alter our daily choices
Instead of ignoring our emotions, we need to better understand them
There’s an explanation for everything that seems miraculous
We don’t have a naturally clear idea of success and failure
Be careful where your information comes from
Probability is often ignored
Unclear thinking can hurt you in the workplace
Advertisers love using your unclear thoughts to trick you
Final summary
Now read the book
What’s it about?
From time to time, we’ve all found ourselves having trouble focusing on
decisions. Be it the tiny choices we make day to day, or the big decisions
that may define our careers—our minds sometimes struggle to take the
logical choice, even when we should be well-aware that what we’re doing
isn’t the right decision. Why is this? What’s wrong with the way our minds
work?
Psychologists call this kind of illogical thinking “cognitive error,” and it
happens to every human being on the face of the planet. Many of these
tiny errors are actually related and combine with each other to lead us
through thought patterns that are illogical, harmful, and, worst of all,
easily manipulated. Luckily, one of the best ways to defend against these
kinds of errors is to become aware of them, and The Art of Thinking
Clearly is here to help.
This book outlines the irrational way your brain works, helping you to
overcome common cognitive errors and achieve a clear mind. It won’t
teach you how to focus on your tasks, but it will teach you how not to
focus on anything but your tasks—letting you think clearly and rationally,
and ensuring you can’t be taken advantage of as easily. These errors
aren’t random—they’re regularly made mistakes that every human
makes, meaning they’re repeatable, provable, and, most importantly,
correctable.
Our emotions alter our daily choices
Emotions are a powerful force for changing our minds, and in fact our
feelings are behind the majority of the cognitive errors affecting our
choices on a daily basis. While emotions are important, we risk making
harmful and unwise choices when we allow them to alter our rational
decision making.
Most of our judgments are made on the assumption that we completely
understand the choices on offer, but in fact the way our mind works
actively prevents this. Rationally, we should be making decisions by
weighing the benefits and risks of each option and coming to a logical
understanding of what is the best choice. But too often we allow our
impulsive emotions to override logic and reason, leading to a mental
shortcut known as the “affect heuristic.”
Our minds seek to protect us from anything that’s too demanding, and, as
odd as it sounds, our minds see excessive heavy thought as something
taxing and exhausting, preferring instead simple logic. This is why the
paradox of choice exists—the more choice we have, the more likely it is
we’ll make a poor decision. Our brain knows this, and so it attempts to
save us from miscalculation by forcing us to lead with our feelings instead
of our logic.
It’s important to utilize our emotions in decision making, as they’re one of
our body’s natural ways of telling us what it needs. But when they
override our good sense, we begin to experience problems. Normally
when there’s a problem, we’d try to find a way to solve it, but the internal
nature of these problems makes things much more complicated.
Instead of ignoring our emotions, we need to
better understand them
There are a number of ways the mind uses emotions to distort the way
we process thoughts. We are each under the influence of the
“overconfidence effect”—a subconscious assumption that we know more
than we do. This combines with another error called the “introspection
illusion,” which makes us think our beliefs are much more valid than
someone else’s beliefs. These errors work together to give us confidence
when processing information and making choices. Confidence is a
powerful positive emotion that overrides many negative emotions, but this
confidence can be dangerous since it doesn’t reflect an accurate picture
of our true knowledge. In addition, our brain suffers from “confirmation
bias,” filtering new information so it appears to be compatible with the
beliefs we already hold, even when it is absolutely not.
Our emotions can also be easily influenced by outside resources like
incentives and reasoning. We subconsciously want everything that
happens to have a purpose, so when someone gives us a reason for an
action or an incentive to complete a job, our minds see an end to the
story and our emotions light up positively. This kind of emotional charge
is the cause of many of our bizarre behaviors, and while it can be
combated somewhat by discipline and rational thought, part of every
person’s mind will always be ruled by emotions.
The powerful emotions we feel can distort the way we make our every
choice, and there’s no way to simply ignore their effects. Instead, we
need to learn more about how our emotions affect our decision making,
and being knowledgeable about the cognitive errors they bring about
most often is the best way to do so. Once you know what to look out for,
you’ll be able to recognize problems as they arise, leading you to
understand the power of emotions in your life.
There’s an explanation for everything that
seems miraculous
Patterns are an organized, low-effort way for our brains to organize and
store information, so naturally humans want to look for patterns in the
world around them. Often, we find them in places we least expect them.
We see the faces of deities in the patterns on a piece of toast. We notice
a pattern of positive things, and attribute that success to good luck. We
see unlikely things happen, and call them miracles. In reality, these are
all just random patterns, created by chance and happened upon also by
chance. Our “self-selection bias” just highlights the patterns in our lives
that are consistent with our personal beliefs on luck or religion. To keep a
rational mind, we must look past these patterns and see what’s really
happening.
Everything in this world happens for natural reasons: a combination of
countless causes and effects. What we see as miraculous is usually just
very unlikely. Our minds, however, prefer a neat and tidy story, so we
often seek to attribute things to one single cause. When we do this, it
means we’re ignoring the possibility of any other causes, creating a belief
that every special occurrence has to come from that one source. But
often what makes these things special isn’t luck, a miracle, or any other
single source. It’s the effects of multiple sources coming together to
produce what we see as miraculous.
An error known as “false causality” also adds to the issue. This describes
a situation where there is a cause and an effect, but we mistakenly switch
the two around, believing that the effect is really the cause. For example,
imagine you’ve won a contest where you had a 1 in 1,000 chance of
success. You might be tempted to assume that luck caused you to win,
but you have your information backwards. You won the contest by
chance, and your winning caused you to believe that luck existed. In
other words, luck didn’t cause you to win; winning caused you to believe
in luck!
In any situation where you believe something miraculous is taking place,
In any situation where you believe something miraculous is taking place,
stop and ask yourself what’s really going on. Is this a miracle, or is this
just random chance? Did some sort of heavenly power bring this event
about, or is this event making me believe in the existence of a heavenly
power? When you ask these questions, you’ll begin to find rational
answers that will help you stay grounded in reality.
We don’t have a naturally clear idea of success
and failure
Success and failure seem like easy concepts to grasp. We always strive
to attain success, look to avoid failure, and, in an ideal world, learn from
each. But the way our brain interprets both is anything but clear, leading
us to hold false perceptions of our own skill and worth.
Many cognitive errors come together to make success look much easier
and more attainable than it is. When looking at groups of successful
people, we often subconsciously assume that what they do is easy,
perhaps even believing that we could be doing the same thing. This error,
known as the “survivorship bias,” makes us forget that for every success
we see on television or read about in the news, there are countless
untold parallel stories of people who have failed to achieve success. Our
minds therefore believe success to be more achievable than it is because
we’re constantly surrounded by success stories, and only success
stories.
Our brains interpret failure inaccurately, too, but in a more dangerous
way. Our brains are prone to “cognitive dissonance”: a cognitive error in
which we mentally reinterpret a situation to convince ourselves we
haven’t really failed. For example, if we fail to get a promotion, instead of
learning from the failure, we may try to convince ourselves that we didn’t
really want it in the first place. And if we’re trying to correct an ever-
worsening problem, we’ll convince ourselves that things always “get
worse before they get better.” Neither of these are helpful to personal
growth, and they distort the world around us to a harmfully unrealistic
degree. You can’t make rational decisions if you can’t interpret reality!
Perhaps the most dangerous misinterpretation of success and failure is
the almost universally held idea that success is always a good thing. We
as humans are sometimes so driven to win that we don’t recognize
situations where we stand to lose more by winning than we stand to gain.
Psychologists call this the “winner’s curse.” For example, imagine your
coworker has stolen some of your work. To prove it, you access his email
coworker has stolen some of your work. To prove it, you access his email
account to find evidence. You get him fired, but you’re fired as well for
breaching company security. You’ve lost more than you’ve gained.
For these errors, vigilance is the key. To keep a clear mind, you need to
constantly keep a realistic idea of your own skill level, as well as the
chance you have to succeed. Be honest with yourself about failures, and,
most of all, set a limit on yourself so you’ll know when to stop pursuing a
dangerous or harmful goal.