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Don't Believe Everything You Think (Kida, 2006)

The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

Thomas E. Kida

Do you believe that you can consistently beat the stock market if you put in the effort?--that some people have extrasensory perception?--that crime and drug abuse in America are on the rise?

Many people hold one or more of these beliefs although research shows that they are not true. This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective decision maker.

Author Thomas Kida identifies a "six-pack of problems" that leads many of us to accept false ideas. The book vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous eye-opening examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn't true.

• We prefer stories to statistics
• We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas
• We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events
• We sometimes misperceive the world around us
• We tend to oversimplify our thinking
• We have faulty memories

p.25 It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief. -George Bernard Shaw

p.28 Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. -Bertrand Russell

p.56 This guiding rule of science - choosing the simplest explanation - is called Occam's razor, after the fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Occam.

p.102 We see what we expect to see and what we want to see.

p.103 The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend - Henri-Louis Bergson

p.103 Expectations can lead to hallucinations!

p.105 Our expectations have consequences not only for our perceptions and judgments, but also for our reactions.

p.107 Our desires influence our perceptions.

p.111 our perception... it's a constructive process that's determined not only by what our senses detect, but also by what we expect and want to see.

p.117 Remember, Occam's razor says we should accept the explanation with the fewest assumptions.

p.133 We humans have a great desire to predict things.

p.153 As we've seen, we attempt to predict many things that are essentially unpredictable. Why aren't they predictable? Two major reasons come to mind: chaos and complexity.

p.167 Our decisions can be quite complex... Heuristics are general rules of thumb that we use to simplify complicated judgments. These simplifying strategies can be quite beneficial: they reduce the time and effort required to make a decision, and they often result in reasonably good decisions. While heuristics give good approximate, rather than exact, solutions to our problems, approximate solutions are often good enough.