You Are Not So Smart

I have  mentioned before that Skeptic Magazine is part of my regular reading (See earlier post). Skeptic also provides a regular online version with automatic mailings. Recently I was poking around the Skeptic site and discovered that Skeptic supports a series of podcasts on topics that interest thinking people—Skepticality. I believe there are almost 200 podcasts available.

Listening to a recent podcast interview with David McRaney, the author of the weblog on WordPress called You Are Not So Smart, speaking about all the ways we lie to ourselves. One statement from McRaney struck me:  if you’re looking for patterns in the world, you are not so smart. Then I learned that McRaney has collected many of the subjects from his weblog and published a book called (naturally) You Are Not So Smart. I was so fascinated by the discussion that I got online and downloaded the book to my iPad (from iBooks, of course). I have only started reading and I recommend everyone get a copy. McRaney writes easily and makes things obvious. He uses many examples that help understanding the subjects but doesn’t spend so much time in his explanation that the reader gets lost or confused. Logic can be fun!

I have already shared some of the knowledge I received from the book and the list of chapters might pique your interest further. First the specifics:

Your Are Not So Smart:  Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 48 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David McRaney (Dutton, 2011).

Table of Contents

1. Priming
2. Confabulation
3. Confirmation Bias
4. Hindsight Bias
5. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
6. Procrastination
7. Normalcy Bias
8. Introspection
9. The Availability Heuristic
10. The Bystander Effect
11. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
12. Apophenia
13. Brand Loyalty
14. The Argument from Authority
15. The Argument from Ignorance
16. The Straw Man Fallacy
17. The Ad Hominem Fallacy
18. The Just-World Fallacy
19. The Public Goods Game
20. The Ultimatum Game
21. Subjective Validation
22. Cult Indoctrination
23. Groupthink
24. Supernormal Releasers
25. The Affect Heuristic
26. Dunbar’s Number
27. Selling out
28. Self-Serving Bias
29. The Spotlight Effect
30. The Third Person Effect
31. Catharsis
32. The Misinformation Effect
33. Conformity
34. Extinction Burst
35. Social Loafing
36. The Illusion of Transparency
37. Learned Helplessness
38. Embodied Cognition
39. The Anchoring Effect
40. Attention
41. Self-Handicapping
42. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
43. The Moment
44. Consistency Bias
45. The Representativeness Heuristic
46. Expectation
47. The Illusion of Control
48. The Fundamental Attribution Error

There’s also a great bibliography if you want to go even deeper into some of these subjects.