The subtitle to Kida’s book is “The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking.” Although I did not learn a great deal from this book that I have not already read elsewhere, I found it exceptionally worthwhile because it brings together the most common mistakes in thinking that are usually segregated into resources from different fields of study, such as critical thinking, psychology, and neuroscience. Kida is a skeptic, without apology, as am I. Despite the bad rap that skeptics often receive, as Kida says,
A skeptic is just a person who wants to see and evaluate the evidence before believing. In its truest sense, a skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind, but requires rigorous investigation before choosing to believe something.
In this book, he winnows the common problems that get in the way of clear thinking to six:
- We prefer stories to statistics.
- We seek to confirm.
- We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in life.
- We can misperceive our world.
- We oversimplify.
- We have faulty memories.
