http://pro-libertate.net/20110301/155-read-why-we-make-mistakes ( )

How we look without seeing, forge

This is an informative and often entertaining book about the psychology of decision-making and behaviour. If you are looking for advice on how to avoid making mistakes, this probably isn't the right book. However, it does have many thought-provoking sections and I may give more thought to minor decision-making.

One segment I found interesting was on the topic of finality vs the possibility of change.

"Hope impedes adaptation, meaning if you are stuck with something, you learn to live with it. Voters, for instance, have been shown to recognize the strengths of a candidate they opposed once that candidate is elected."

Looks like this will be put to the test in the US since the 2016 election results. ( )

This is a light, accessible book that gives an overview of why humans make mistakes, and how difficult it is to fix mistakes that are the result of ingrained processes that our brains have developed to make us more efficient. It treads over ground covered in such books as Predictably Irrational (Ariely), The Idiot Brain (Burnett), and The Design of Everyday Things (Norman). In fact, Norman even blurbs this book. (If you read Why We Make Mistakes and are interested in learning about affordances and constraints when designing products, definitely read The Design of Everyday Things.)

The book covers a lot of ground and provides a good starting point for reading about the weirdness of human behaviour; the bibliography at the back will provide further avenues to explore. ( )

Interesting examination of some of the psychological principles behind human error. My two reservations are that the author sometimes seems to stop abruptly in explaining a concept and switch to a different topic. Perhaps he doesn't want to let the explanation get too involved? My other issue is that while many of the illustrating examples are entertaining, not all of them seem well-chosen to illustrate the principles he is trying to define. Often he attributes a certain action or situation to one principle that could have been influenced by many other variables. This seems like rather sloppy work to me. ( )