Mindware Book Summary:
Richard Nisbatt’s Mindware is a guide for explaining the foundations behind our choices and how you can use them to better serve your needs.
Related Book Summaries to Mindware:
Quotes:
Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about.
Whether you’re heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.
we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don’t understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.
Mindware Book Summary Big Ideas:
Correlation and Causation
Because two events occur at the same time doesn’t mean that one causes the other. We as humans have a tendency to believe this sort of thing especially if it reconfirmed something we already held to be true.
The author gives some great examples such as the correlation between longer life expectancy and going to church. Along with a countries IQ being correlated to its wealth.
Evidence Of Our Presumptions
Regardless of how rational a person would want you to believe they are, we all fall victim to at least some logical fallacies. Our brains have the ability to apply shortcuts to certain situations to allow us to make faster decisions on the fly. This may have been much more helpful earlier in our history when we needed to make life and death snap decisions.
Today these same decisions cause distortions in our decision making process. We even make certain decisions based on certain objects such as weapons. If we see a weapon we are very likely to immediately believe that person with the weapon to be aggressive and we will most likely want to get away from them. This particular shortcut is the representativeness heuristic.
The Laws Of Logic
Back in Ancient Greece, the philosopher, Aristotle came up with the basic principles of reasoning that let anyone assess the validity of an argument.
The basic idea is that if premise 1 and 2 are correct then the resulting answer should also be correct. The author uses the example of spam emails and the fact that if the sender actually knew a fast way to ‘make easy money’ would they share it? No. So the spam email is likely a lie.
