The Art of Thinking Clearly

"Yes. This is quite a light book in comparison with the others. It’s really a summary of 99 moves in thinking, some of them psychological, some of them logical, some of them social. What I like about it is that he uses lots of examples. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book you can dip into. I would think it would be very indigestible to read it from cover to cover, but it’s a book to keep going back to. I included it because it suggests you can you improve your critical thinking by having labels for things, recognising the moves, but also by having examples which are memorable, through which you can learn. This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself; he’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place. Just to give a flavour of the book: he’s got a chapter on the paradox of choice that’s three pages long called ‘Less is More,’ and it’s the very simple idea that if you present somebody with too many choices, rather than freeing them and improving their life and making them happier, it wastes a lot of their time, even destroys the quality of their life. “If you present somebody with too many choices, it wastes a lot of their time” I saw an example of this the other day in the supermarket. I bumped into a friend who was standing in front of about 20 different types of coffee. The type that he usually buys wasn’t available, and he was just frozen in this inability to make a decision between all the other brands that were in front of him. If there’d only been one or two, he’d have just gone for one of those quickly. Dobelli here is summarising the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz who concluded that generally, a broader selection leads people to make poorer decisions for themselves. We think going into the world that what we need is more choice, because that’ll allow us to do the thing we want to do, acquire just the right consumable, or whatever. But perhaps just raising that possibility, the increased number of choices will lead us to make poorer choices than if we had fewer to choose between. Now, that’s the descriptive bit, but at the end of this short summary, he asks ‘So what can you do about this practically?’ His answer is that you should think carefully about what you want before you look at what’s on offer. Write down the things you think you want and stick to them. Don’t let yourself be swayed by further choices. And don’t get caught up in a kind of irrational perfectionism. This is not profound advice, but it’s stimulating. And that’s typical of the book. You can flip through these entries and you can take them or leave them. It’s a kind of self-help manual. It really is in that self-help genre, and it’s nicely done. He gets in and out in a couple of pages for each of these. I wouldn’t expect this to be on a philosophy reading list or anything like that, but it’s been an international bestseller. It’s a clever book, and I think it’s definitely worth dipping into and coming back to. The author is not claiming that it is the greatest or most original book in the world; rather, it’s just a book that’s going to help you think clearly. That’s the point. He’s optimistic too, unlike Kahneman. Dobelli’s not saying you’re caught up in all these biases and there’s nothing you can do about it. He’s saying there is a sense in which you can do something about all this. That may be just another cognitive bias, an illusion, but I’m biased towards thinking that thinking about things can change the way we behave. It might be difficult, but reflecting on the things that you’re doing is, I believe, the first step towards thinking more clearly."