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    Irrationality: The enemy within
    Unavailable
    Irrationality: The enemy within
    Unavailable
    Irrationality: The enemy within
    Ebook439 pages8 hours

    Irrationality: The enemy within

    By Stuart Sutherland

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    New, 21st anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and Bad Pharma, and an afterword by James Ball, covering developments in our understanding of irrationality over the last two decades.

    Why do doctors, army generals, high-ranking government officials and other people in positions of power make bad decisions that cause harm to others? Why do prizes serve no useful function? Why are punishments so ineffective? Why is interviewing such an unsatisfactory method of selection?

    Irrationality is a challenging and thought-provoking book that draws on statistical concepts, probability theory and a mass of intriguing research to expose the failings of human reasoning, judgement and intuition. The author explores the inconsistencies of human behaviour, and discovers why even the experts find it so hard to make rational and unbiased decisions.

    Written with clarity and occasional flashes of wry humour, this classic volume is just as relevant today as when it was first written twenty-one years ago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPinter & Martin
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781780660288
    Unavailable
    Irrationality: The enemy within
    Author

    Stuart Sutherland

    Stuart Sutherland is a former editor with the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

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    Reviews for Irrationality

    4/5

    78 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is the first pop science book on rationality I ever read, and it made a great impression on me. Of course, this is now more than twenty years old (the first edition dates from 1992), and probably nowadays there are many eqivalent books, but this one gives a good overview of many common pitfalls in decision making, illustrating many cognitive biases: from selective evidence, to overconfidence and ignoring or misinterpreting evidence. So you wont' get exposure to the latest developments on decision making, but the topics he treats are still current - Sutherland was a psychologist by trade, and he seems to know very well what he was writing about, adding to this a gripping writing style.

      One thing I learned is: if you phone your friend to tell him you wrecked his car, then tell him it was a joke, he will forever think of you as a bad driver, even if you returned the car he lent you in absolutely pristine conditions! The moral of it - careful when making jokes :-)

    • 4/5
      Good insights into how people think irrationally, very strong on evidence from psychological studies, with thorough academic references at the back. Nevertheless very readable and informative. There's rather less coverage on why people think irrationally and what can be done about it. Just getting a little bit dated I felt. I liked the short chapter format; each one ends with a summary in the form of a short list of Morals to be drawn from the evidence in the chapter. Personally I would have liked to see an appendix with the mathematical details of the various models for decision making that are explained briefly but referred to frequently in the text.
    • 3/5
      The writing was perfectly fine, but I was already familiar with the concepts and information. So I quit reading it.