You Are Now Less Dumb

I was alarmingly reluctant to read this book. It is not pleasing feeling to find out how flawed we are -as human beings. It is not reassuring sense to know that your "great thinking" almost a product of a jumble of biases and fallacies.Then it was a moment of epiphany, as a sudden comforting sense of humbleness engulfed me. We are inherently evolving souls who are in a constant flux of change. This humbleness implies three life-changing lessons:1- No matter how strong your beliefs or opinions are, hold them weakly, and take them with a grain of salt. You do not know which biases you are succumbing to.2- Scientific methods are the only available tool so far to make distinction between facts and delusions. One caveat here: science is continuous process to figure out natural phenomena, so do not use it in reductionist way, not seeing the forest for the trees. It is all about engaging in the scientific discovery journey.3- Historically speaking, dogmas, rituals, supernatural beliefs, religions, and the like have played critical roles in our development and emergence as human beings. Although no ideology must be immune to critique, no matter how sacred or holy it is in the view of the followers. Viewing these in the context of human mind biases endows us a more balanced and a more human-centered perspective. This is the anthropologist viewpoint that gives us a sense of our shared human existence and the belonging to the same boat.

I'm a big fan of David's first book, You are Not So Smart and his latest, You are Now Less Dumb, does not disappoint.Just like his first book, David explains how we trick ourselves into thinking we are smarter than we are, in control, rational and reasonable. Of course, the twist with this book is he lets us in on how to overcome our human frailty by using our self-delusions to improve ourselves.I really love the way the book is laid out with the Misconception and then The Truth -- just like the first one. The book is well research (but not too stuffy or heady) with great stories, trivia and some pop culture thrown in to make it relatable and a joy to read.The examples and studies are what really drive home the points in the book. My favorite is The Post Hoc Fallacy, which deals with why we find it so difficult to believe that a sequence of events means nothing. This is the behavior behind lucky shirts, favorite meals, rituals and Power Balance bracelets. This section really illustrates the tendency of our minds to find patterns where none exist. That insight along is worth its weight in gold.You don't need to read his first book, You Are Not So Smart, to enjoy this book. Both books do stand-a-lone but are good complements to each other.Lets hope all of us become less dump so we can get on with living instead of worrying about how many acres we need to plant and tend to in FarmVille.

Looking at this as a pop psychology, as it's advertised, this is a very enjoyable and thought provoking book skimming the surface of several topics relating to how our minds can be irrational surprisingly often.Actually some of the more negative ratings on Amazon before I read the book actually helped me a lot reading in this book, as with any field the jargon can make word meanings be a little different, and the claim that the book is poorly edited made me look up a few words when I ran across them. On that comes to mind was affective/effective. Looking it up, the editing happens to be correct, but I was have assumed it was an error had I not read that review. I might have learned more diving into that than the material itself in the book.In general, if you're looking for a menu of topics to read up on over the internet (not something I recommend if say, you're training to be in this field, but for entertainment purposes only) this is actually a fantastic read. I'm looking forward to pulling the book out again to find a new topic that interests me and diving in.

I'm not quite as enamored of this book as I was with "You're Not So Smart", David McRainey's first work in this area. Still, it's an interesting read into how we make mistakes in how we view ourselves, our decision making abilities and how we interact with others.David McRaney seems determined to continually validate the writing by referring to study after study with lots of author attribution and the like. That's probably how it should be if he were writing an academic paper. This book is ostensibly for a mass audience and the constant references to source material gets a tad tiresome. It may have made the book flow better if there were endnotes acknowledging the studies. Although the book might have been quite a bit shorter had he gone that route.It's also a slower read than the first book. The author's occasional stab at humor and use of contemporary examples of each chapter's explanation of a cognitive bias are too far and few between.It's a good book, though, especially if you like the exploration into why we do the things we do.

I love what the book teaches you. I'm applying the afformations on a daily basis and I have even made one that is the one they are suppose to give you by the end of the book, but never do. But is not difficult to figure it out. This, if you believe in it, is a powerful and empowering tool. I can "feel" the difference between my inner reactions with affIrmations and affOrmations. I use it every day whenever I am driving or killing some time between meetings or stop lights.What I did not lik a bit, as many other people have stated before me, was that this book is also used as a marketing tool for other afformation products. I wish they can go back like the old days when they would give you a great book, and maybe by the end they would use the last page to promote other books from the author. I think is a mistake to do this kind of marketing and the editors should stop promoting it.

The author writes in a simple, light fashion throughout the book. The sections are pretty much consistent, having examples of our day-to-day flaws followed by scientific experiments, culminating in a conclusion. I felt like most sections tackles very similar mind flaws in a sense thus making it a little repetitive sometimes but still a good read.

Buen libro

Um ótimo livro que todo mundo deveria ler e refletir. Já me sinto 1% menos burro =P. Recomendadíssimo. E já pretendo comprar os outros livros do autor.

I recently spent three hyper-stimulated hours reading this book and I learned something I've always suspected: The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility. If you were dating the mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway. If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned "King of the Pit." Here are some areas that the book covered.Spoilers: Let's start with memory. It doesn't exist. What you think of as your childhood memories are actually a haphazard pastiche of self-serving fictions, hazy re-creations and re-purposed movie scenes held together with a minimal smattering of actual experiences. If you tell your mother about your Christmas memory of getting a new purple bicycle from Uncle Barnett, she will tell you that it was actually Aunt Minnie, and it was a red Go Kart. Whose memory is correct? Neither of yours! Go look at your family photos, and you'll discover that you were actually raised by hobos in an abandoned train station in rural Turkey. Perception? Perception is laughable. Did you ever, as a child, try to write a book report based on a quick reading of the first chapter and cover copy of a novel? That's perception. Your mind takes in a constant geyser of data every instant of the day, discards most of it as unimportant, then fills in the spaces with assumptions and diversions. If your perception were a sausage, it would be classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a pork-flavored sawdust tube. A parade of thugs and fashion critics could pass through your living room without you noticing, provided you were distracted by a sufficiently shiny piece of tinfoil. How about decision-making? At least you have free will, the ability to rise above the limitations of your mind, right? You're precious when you lie to yourself. The fact is that by the time you actually think you're making a decision, a shadowy cabal of hormones and electrical currents have already set you on your course. I'm not just talking about fight-or-flight level stuff here. Even your hour-long diatribe about Neutral Milk Hotel that had everyone at the party last week checking their cellphones for new messages was delivered to you by some attention-deprived corner of your unconscious mind.I learned that, in the end, you can't trust what you see, you can't trust what you know, and you can't even trust your sense of self. Sure, on some level you think, therefore you are, but when it comes down to it, all you really are is the Betty Crocker on the cake mix of your own existence, a pleasant fiction wrapped around a container of chemicals and carbon.So, all in all, it was a pretty cool book,

I love this book! It's a fascinating study of the unconscious mind and how we are moving through life, "making" decisions! When, in actual fact, much of the time our responses are simply automatic based on the stimuli offered/experienced. It really is eye opening to discover what our thoughts are comprised of, and where they come from....