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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Book Review: Blink

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell

It's been a long time since a book blew me away like this. I must admit, the ideas and concepts proposed by Gladwell were extremely foreign to me and they were unsettling. The (very basic) gist of the book is that if you have extended experience with something, you can make the right decision within milliseconds - in the blink of an eye. The deeper I got into this book, the more freaked out I became.

Why was I so intimidated by this book? The first answer is that I find myself to be relatively well read and I had never heard of such a concept. It's such a new perspective that I hadn't even caught a whiff of it. Second, my life is very structured, especially in the realm of problems. I have a problem. I analyze it. I research it. I return to the problem with a plan and a back up plan. What Gladwell tells me is that I don't have to do all that if the area the problem is set in is an area of my personal expertise.

As a control freak, manic time manager, diligent source checker and overall OCD victim, the idea of making a decision, an important decision, in the blink of an eye is completely bananas. Yet, with Gladwell's fantastic writing, in depth research, clear examples and beautifully crafted argument, in the end I got it. The examples ranged from being able to tell the health of a marriage within 30 seconds to how a war game is won to the thinking process of a cop when he has to decide whether he's going to fire his gun.

Trust me that this review, nor almost any review, will be able to tell you how this book is going to effect you. It didn't hit home for me until I was at the last 50 pages. I have found that I'm starting to trust myself more, especially when I'm working in an area I've mastered, like librarianship. Even in writing I think I have this type of automatic response. Going with your gut is actually good form, despite the risks involved. I can't believe I just wrote that last statement.

This book is an exploration of instincts and the subconscious and it's a journey that I'm glad I embarked upon. It was very strange and very worth it.