Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

Usually after you understand you may have biases and perceptual problems- what next

Rajkumar Couppoussamy yet to read . Book came in good condition.

An excellent product indeed. Spacious, smart looking and useful.

This is the second time I am ordering this book and even the second time, the book was delivered in a damaged condition.

Tools that are necessary for scientific thinking, Pinker truly is the paragon of reason.

The print is great, but the cover is damaged.

I have just read this book and will read it again, more slowly. It achieves its aim, which is to make one think rationally and even more important, to realise what is rational and what is prejudice or bias wrapped up as rationality.Much of the earlier pages is mathematical in concept and spells out probability thinking in a comparatively digestible way. But even in these simpler earlier chapters, you have to take it slowly and go back and forth over the arguments or it is too easy to gloss over something really important.Later, the chapters get less mathematical and frankly, a bit more offering opinions about irrational thinking than hard reason. As the arguments get further from logic and maths into bias, prejudice, taboos so it begins to relate less to learning from a professor and more on thinking that can be challenged.However, the book is so densely written in places that I am sure I have missed some essential thinking, hence the decision to read again, still, I hope with an open mind. That is a condition that the author feels is essential to all rational thinking, and I heartily agree. Too much of the current discourse about identity, politics, diversity, morality and religion is based on tribal gut feeling, not nearly enough on listening to other arguments, comparing and contrasting, weighing up evidence. This book is an essentail antidote to that, but I fear will be lost on those who think differently before they read it.

Steven Pinker rejects the cynical view that human beings are hopelessly irrational, and becoming more so. In our everyday lives, we are pretty good at behaving rationally and, as a species, the very significant progress we have made in terms of pushing back the frontiers of disease, famine, war, extreme poverty, inhumanity and cruelty have been, in large measure, due to our collective deployment of rationality. Nevertheless, we need training in rationality just as we need training in literacy and numeracy.The largest portion of this book consists of a fairly advanced manual in critical thinking. It’s not the kind of book that can be read at speed. Each chapter could form the basis for a taught module in logic, probability, game theory and so on. Much of it will be familiar to those who have read similar books. Most of us by now are, or should be, familiar with biases and fallacies such as confirmation bias (selecting evidence which confirms our beliefs), ad hominem attacks (criticising the person, not the argument), the principle that correlation does not imply causation (an increase in margarine sales may correlate with an increase in teenage pregnancies, but it’s unlikely that one is the cause of the other), and so on. But there’s a great number of more advanced ideas I hadn’t heard of including hyperbolic discounting, heretical counterfactuals, instrumental variable regression and much more. Getting to grips with this material requires considerable effort.One of the most shocking revelations was how ignorance of Bayesian reasoning can lead to unnecessary medical treatment. If you get a positive test result for a disease that has a 10/1000 prevalence in the population and the false positive rate is, say, 9%, what’s your chance of actually having the disease? Many people, including many doctors, ignore the base rate (the actual prevalence of the disease) and conclude it’s a 91% chance, whereas in fact it’s closer to 9% because of all the false positives that will result from testing 1000 people. If you want to check out this claim (and I had to scratch my head a bit!) Pinker does the maths on page 169.Rationality and intelligence do not necessarily go together. Highly intelligent people can be just as vulnerable as everyone else to fallacies and biases such as motivated reasoning and my-side bias. But we’re not hopelessly irrational. Often, our irrationalities have rational motivations such as the desire to win an argument rather than to get at the truth. But human progress depends on rationality and we should all try to get better at it. Pinker’s book is one of many that can help.

I have enjoyed many of Steven Pinker’s books and Rationality is no exception. Covering various errors people make in reasoning (cognitive bias, logical fallacies, etc), it provides a good, clear introduction to the subject.It’s not particularly that simple, though. Yes, the language may be clear, but working through some of the puzzles, I found myself making many of the errors Pinker points to. Hence the reason for this type of book. Anyway, I’m now a little bit more aware of them than before I read the book.As I say, I always enjoy Pinker’s books and his writing style, so I look forward to the next instalment from this gifted psychologist and communicator.I hope you find my review helpful.

Book is in not new condition. It’s a present so I’ll probably be returning it for a new undamaged copy.

This has been bought as a gift. It does not appear to be new. Outer cover torn. No time to send back and get a new one, I will have to apologise profusely to recipient.