Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds

I found Inevitable Illusions extremely beneficial and enlightening. The author of the book (originally published in Italian) presents us with our own "tunnel vision" - exposing our "cognitive leaps" - and reveals to us the traps in our obsession with guessing, and guessing erroneously, many times to our own peril. The premise might be comparable to the practice of entomology (where physics, statistics and probability trumps dumb luck everytime). Delving still further into Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book takes the reader into the "blind luck" world where many of us live everyday, but it refuses to leave us stumbling around down there. Inevitable Illusions -- shows us how mistakes of reason rule our minds. Cognitive Science: The new intellectual frontier!

"Let the thinker beware" could be the motto for this excellent and very useful book. Author Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini has done a masterful job of arraying some of the most serious and most commonplace errors of judgment, estimation and deduction. The style is mostly straightforward, if academic, and makes the meat of the book's message accessible to the general reader. One quibble is that the author's explanation of certain probability calculations (especially Bayes' theorem) leaves them less clear than they could be. That aside, we give this book the highest recommendation, especially for those who like to consider how people understand their world. If you are devoted to clear thinking, you could practically use it to conduct a daily scrutiny of your mental processes - an examination of cognition similar to the monastic examination of conscience - to identify and correct any inclinations to serious cognitive sin.

well written, interesting, understandable . . . i couldn't put the book down. clear and concise . . . with humor to boot. the case studies and examples are so well written that you'll find yourself quoting them.if only more people would read books like these -- many fewer stupid and dangerous mistakes would be made.

This is a fascinating book about the counter-intuitiveness of the relationship between how much we think we know and the quality of our perceptions and our ability to make rational perceptions. This is part and parcel of the writings of Tom Robbins (http://www.rain.org/~da5e/tom_robbins.html) The higher our certainty about things, Massimo points out, the more careful we must be in our assessments. I highly recommend this book. -Dale Kirb

This book is very interesting! It gives examples of mental traps that people will consistently and predictably fall into, thereby making the reader at least a bit less likely to fall into such traps in the future. I recommend also reading the book "Influence: Science and Practice" to compare the implications of the two books.