Part of the Casswiki article series Books
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself is a book by David McRaney, first published in 2011. In an informative, yet humorous and easy-going way, it describes a large number of cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and in general, ways in which people think and act which are not in their own best interests, as a result of the flaws of the human brain and mind.
This book gives an excellent overview of many troublesome tendencies of the human brain, and the ways in which they can make us delude ourselves, derail us, and keep us from acting in our own best interests. It can be a helpful (and entertaining) read for better understanding these flaws of our nature, and how to take them into account so as to less often fall prey to them.
David McRaney has also written a follow-up, titled You Are Now Less Dumb.
See also
- Adaptive unconscious
- Cognitive bias
- Heuristic
- Logical fallacy
- Subjectivity
- You Are Now Less Dumb
- Strangers to Ourselves
- [[Redirect (book)|Redirect (book)]]
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite
- Brain Changer
External links
- Cassiopaea Forum: Rational? Logical? Objective? Maybe not… (You Are Not So Smart – excerpts and discussion: introduction and priming.)
- Cassiopaea Forum: Do you know when you are lying to yourself? (You Are Not So Smart – excerpts and discussion: confabulation.)
- Cassiopaea Forum: Are other people REALLY looking at you? (You Are Not So Smart – excerpts and discussion: the spotlight effect.)
- Cassiopaea Forum: The Third Person Effect (You Are Not So Smart – excerpts and discussion: the third person effect.)
- Cassiopaea Forum: Why Nobody is Doing Anything About the State of the Planet (You Are Not So Smart – excerpts and discussion: normalcy bias.)
- YouAreNotSoSmart.com (David McRaney’s website, containing a number of the articles which formed the basis for his books, and other related information.)
- Skepticality Episode #178 – You Are Not So Smart (Interview with David McRaney about You Are Not So Smart and related matters. The actual interview begins at 7:52.)