In short, the book contains a collection of common misconceptions about ourselves, and what we can learn from them.
After reading, I felt like writing down some the key points, so I might as well share them in a blog post. The bullet points written in italic are my own 2 cents.
1. "Priming":
- Most of the time, we are unaware that we are being influenced. Reason is that only a small fraction of our subjective experience happens at the conscious level, the rest happens on "autopilot" and is subject to influence without being noticed.
- We can be more successful by taking this into account, in particular when we want to change our own behaviors ("prime ourselves"). E.g. by creating environments where we get desired stimuli even when our brain is on auto-pilot.
- Alright, I'll add a few pictures of healthy food and people doing work-out to my desk.
2. "Confabulation":
- We often create "stories" in our head to explain our own decisions and behaviors, and even our own history. In other words, we're lying to ourselves without being aware of it.
- Keeping this in mind and acting on it can help us make better decisions.
- I guess this means we should be open to double-checking even those facts that we know "for sure", in particular when making important decisions.
3. "Confirmation Bias"
- We typically like to be told what we already know or believe.
- To form well-rounded opinions, we shouldn't only look out for validation; but also seek evidence for what is contrary to our current point of view.
- Ok - I'll watch "Fox News" once in a while from now on...
4. "Hindsight Bias"
- We tend to forget that we changed our mind. I.e. we sort of "edit" our memory and erase the parts where we didn't know something or had a different believe that we have today.
- Knowing this, we should be skeptical when other people state that they've "always known" something.
- Also, knowing this will help us being more constructive in discussions and arguments - by keeping in mind that due to hindsight bias, the other person might really believe he/she is right and never was wrong in the past.
- Makes sense to me, although I wonder how to argue with a person who is convinced to be right. Certainly I wouldn't wanna say "You're wrong! That's called hindsight bias!"...
5. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
- We tend to see patterns and meanings in purely random events.
- Accepting that the world is full of random conincidences can help us focus on things that have real meanings.
6. Procrastination
- We're often subject to the "present bias": we ignore that what we want now is different from what we will want later.
- To avoid procrastination, our "now-self" needs to outmaneuver our "future-self".
- There's nothing wrong with admitting not to have a "strong will" when it comes to implementing resolutions. It's perfectly fine and actually a smart thing to do to trick our future-selves. Examples: ask a friend to remind us to go to the gym; use software which disables internet access to spend less time at the computer.
7. Normalcy Bias
- In a disaster scenario such as an earthquake or plane crash, we tend to mentally "freeze". Instead of acting, we pretend everything is normal and do nothing.
- This can be avoided by thinking ahead about the necessary steps.
- It can make sense to think of what we would do in certain emergencies. For example: what if a car accident happens right in front of us? what if we're in a building that's on fire? We think that we'll be able to quickly identify the right steps and act accordingly, but often that's not true. For example, building on fire -> right thing to do is "get out", but people will often do stuff like "shut down computer" first.
... will continue this later. The book has 48 chapters in total, many of them are pretty interesting.
