Book Summary | The Art of Thinking Clearly(2013)

Recommendation Score: 5 Stars

The book is an enjoyable read and it took me a month to complete it. It worth the time. I can't imagine how many fallacies we have in our everyday thinking. Reading this book is an excellent way to improve our logical thinking.It is challenging for me to summarize the 99 fallacies from the book without listing them and providing a brief explanation for each.​ Here it is:

1. Survivorship Bias: Who are not showing up or in the graveyard also matters. Consider the base-rate neglect additionally.
2. Swimmer’s Body Illusion: don’t forget the selection factors with results.
3. Clustering Illusion: sometime we are sensitive to recognize patterns,
4. Social Proof: following others was a good survival strategy but might not give right answer. Groupthink may lead to delusions. 
5. Sunk Cost Fallacy: The previous investment should not influence our current decision.
6. Reciprocity: People's relationship is essentially a give-and-take situation. Be aware of the free gifts or free helps because you will own other people something because of this.
7. Confirmation Bias: Pay attention to ignored facts, and blindness because of beliefs.
8. Authority Bias
9. Contrast Effect
10. Availability Bias
11. The It’ll-Get-Worse-Before-It-Gets-Better Fallacy
12. Story Bias: Stories attract us; abstract details repel us. With emotions, even better.
13. Hindsight Bias: how unpredictable the world is!
14. Overconfidence Effect: In surveys, 84% of Frenchmen estimate that they are above-average lovers. Without the overconfidence effect, that figure should be exactly 50 percent—after all, the statistical “median” means 50 percent should rank higher and 50 percent should rank lower. In another survey, 93 at% of the U.S. students estimated to be “above average” drivers. And 68% of the faculty at the University of Nebraska rated themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability.
15. Chauffeur Knowledge: “You have to stick within what I call your circle of competence. You have to know what you understand and what you don’t understand. It’s not terribly important how big the circle is. But it is terribly important that you know where the perimeter is.” Munger underscores this: “So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.”
16. Illusion of Control: we don’t have much control as we thought we would have.
17. Incentive Super-Response Tendency: Focus on incentives and rewards because “People respond to incentives by doing what is in their best interests”.“Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.”
18. Regression to Mean: We may recover because of normal process,
19. Outcome Bias: They are many factors determines the outcome.
20. Paradox of Choice: More choices are not always the good thing,
21. Liking Bias: “There’s nothing more effective in selling anything than getting the customer to believe, really believe, that you like him and care about him.”
22. Endowment Effect: we values more on things that we own.
23. Coincidence: don’t be too excited when some rare event happens,
24. Neglect of Probability:we are not sensitive to probability . 
25. Scarcity Error
26. Gambler’s Fallacy (professional oversight;,regression to mean)
27. The Anchor
28. Induction: Nothing is certain but death and taxes.
29. Loss Aversion
30. Social Loafing: occurs when individual performance is not directly visible; it blends into the group effort.
31. Exponential Growth
32. Winner’s Curse: After the Champagne corks pop, the lesion learned don’t go auctions.
33. Fundamental Attribution Error: overestimate individuals’ influence and underestimate external, situational factors.
34. False Causality: Correlation is not causality.
35. Halo Effect
36. Alternative Paths
37. Forecast Illusion
38. Conjunction Fallacy:we have a soft spot for plausible stories.
39. Framing: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
40. Action Bias: “We’ve got . . . discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can’t stand inactivity.”
41. Omission Bias: 
42. Self-Serving Bias: 
43. Hedonic Treadmill: 
44. Self-Selection Bias:
45. Association Bias: Our brain is a connection machine.
46. Beginner’s Luck: Try to disapprove them.
47. Cognitive Dissonance: You can play the clever fox all you want—but you’ll never get the grapes that way.
48. Hyperbolic Discounting: The closer a reward is, the higher our “emotional interest rate” rises and the more we are willing to give up in exchange for it.
49. “Because” Justification: When you justify your behavior, you encounter more tolerance and helpfulness. 
50. Decision Fatigue: Present at 8:00am instead of 6:00pm.
51. Contagion Bias:
52. Cherry Picking
53. Fallacy of the Single Cause There are multiple factors of influence,
54. Intention-to-Treat Error Pay attention to peoples, intention,
55. News Illusion Don’t read the news.