Book Review: You Are Not So Smart

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It took a lot of psychological concepts and put them into understandable terminology without being painfully boring. The authors tone is a bit condescending and he lets his atheist flag fly, but the book is still solid. I'd recommend this book for anyone that thinks life is not fair, thinks they are special, believes in magical coincidence or conspiracy theories, watches Fox News, feels they have original thoughts, thinks they make rational decisions based on information or at all thinks that they are operating on something more than a high-powered monkey brain. Good stuff and the first time psychology hasn't bored me to tears.

My notes:

page 28 "Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias."
page 38"If any of this seems too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, you are not so smart."
page 39 "With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction."
page 49 "The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt."
page 127 Chapter 23 - Groupthink My favorite chapter by the end of the first sentence.
page 193 "You learn quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy, just like an amoeba."
page 213 The embodied cognition chapter talks about how we translate the physical world into words and then we make ourselves believe and make decisions on the words we manifest. This made me think about the TED talk about how designers need to design with all the senses in mind. This chapter supports that talk.

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