January 10, 2017
Interview with Rolf Dobelli, author of the book The Art Of Thinking Clearly
Mike Carruthers: Sure you’re a wise decision maker of at least you’d like to think so. However…
Rolf Dobelli: Our brain is a biological organ that is not made for this world it is made for a different world. It’s made for our ancestor past and that’s why we have these systematic thinking errors.
Rolf Dobelli, author of the book The Art Of Thinking Clearly, says in fact we fall victim to over 100 different thinking errors – for instance over-confidence.
If you ask your listeners are you an above average good driver then roughly 80% of the listeners would say I’m an above average good driver. It should be about 50/50. If you ask French men are you above average good lovers 94% of the French men say yes. So we tend to overestimate our skills.
It was once very useful for humans to be motivated by scarcity but not so much anymore.
Because scarcity was the way of life in the past – it is totally irrational to think that way. You know you go into a store and OK only 3 items left and people go for it – it’s irrational.
And the human brain has the tendency to confuse risk with uncertainty.
That’s a very, very important distinction. So here it is. Risk is whatever you can calculate. Uncertainty is what you can’t calculate. There’s a whole science of risk. If you go to Vegas you can calculate those probabilities in uncertainty you can’t make a calculations.
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