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| Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Mind | 
 enlarge | Author: Massimo Piattellipalmarini
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £4.04
You Save: £4.95 (55%)
New (29) from £4.04
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 21933
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 047115962X
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780471159629
ASIN: 047115962X
Publication Date: October 1, 1996
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 2 - 3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A mind altering read!!! Could save a few businesses managers from doom April 10, 2007
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
One could go as far as to say this book would save a few faltering businesses if the managers sat down and read it.
It really should be taught in schools as part of a cirriculum. People are generally unaware of the congitive paralysis, biases and blind spots governing their lives, causing them to fall into the same traps or be unaware of psychological chains that need breaking. So many could benefit from the understandings portrait in this book.
Not an easy read. The Italian author, has a lot to say in 200 pages, while getting the point across, the content is overly condensed and would be delivered to a bigger audience if he took the science and dumbed it down for the price of a few extra pages.
The examples given are simplistic and real life but a certain complexity exists by nature of the science that should have more detailed explanations.
An amazing book which I will be recommending to many people.
 Interesting but disappointing... March 27, 2007
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
I found this book to be somewhat disappointing. It differed from my expectations first of all by not being, in itself, a good model of clear thinking. The author meanders through his topic at a leisurely pace and uses a good proportion of the start of his book making a case for how important its conclusions are but without yet revealing what they might be - hardly a promising approach. By the time the 'illusions' mentioned in the title are discussed the reader is disappointed to find that rather than being examples of everyday thinking missing the mark they consist of a number of examples where intuitive thinking diverges from the predictions of bayesian probability calculations. Hardly the shocking revelations we are lead to expect by the introduction. As the book continues a few more interesting observations are made about illogical biases in cognition but the emphasis still remains heavily on divergence from mathematical probability.
The total number of observations about the tendencies of human thinking away from objective rational logic are in fact only a few in number and I was left with the feeling that this could have been adequately set out in a magazine article rather than over the length of an entire book. Combined with the amount of verbiage dedicated to arguing for the importance of these few observations it leaves the impression of a somewhat exploitative approach to the reader - hype.
The final chapter of the book contains a discussion of other authors objections to the ideas and despite the authors' intentions to the contrary I was left with the impression that these were generally valid and did indeed undermine the significance of the rest of the book.
Bizarrely the author closes with a broad invective against current understandings about evolution and the reader is left with the impression of a writer too caught up in a personal debate with other individuals to have retained the detached style which should be obviously appropriate to such a topic.
To summarize: There are valid and interesting observations about human thinking patterns to be found here but the book itself is not well-written in terms of either clarity of exposition or reading pleasure.
Packed with Knowledge! October 3, 2005
24 out of 28 found this review helpful
"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.
The more we know the less we think. March 19, 1997
30 out of 39 found this review helpful
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 Kirby
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