About book Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (2009)
I've read many books about cognitive errors, memory mishaps, why we can't navigate, and so on. This is one of the better ones. For one thing, I like the way the chapters are organized by causes of mistakes: "We Skim", "We'd Rather Wing It", and "Men Shoot First" are three examples. I also like the brisk, clear writing, and good story-telling. Finally, I like the way the references are organized. I usually read books like this very quickly, then go back later to drill into some of the primary references. The challenge is to find the appropriate reference. It's a pain to have to re-read big chunks of the text to find the passage that links to the interesting reference. The author (Joseph Hallinan) solves this problem by giving short reference guides for each chapter: e.g. "For coverage of the Van Iveren incident, see Doege (2007)". Then you just flip to the bibliography and you're done.This being a review of a book about mistakes, I'll point out two fascinating - and very minor - ones.1. To make the point that constraints aid memory, the author challenge us to remember the lyrics to The Star-Spangled Banner, *without* singing it. He prints the lyrics at the end of the chapter, including this line: "And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air". This is the line from Francis Scott Key's hand-written original, but by the time the poem was first printed, the line had been changed to "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air", the version that has persisted ever since.2. In the reference guide to the Conclusion, the author writes that "The pupil-dilation experiment is Kahneman and Peavler (1969)". Unfortunately, there's no reference to this experiment in the text. Apparently something was edited out of the main text, but not from the references. In this book, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error, how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes. Hallinan makes the good point that we need to understand why we make mistakes before we can do anything to prevent them."Why We Make Mistakes" is filled with interesting little oddities, such as the fact that most people have an inordinate preference for the number 7 and the colour blue and the fact that our memories are typically much poorer than we realise (explaining why eye witness testimony is so unreliable). "Why We Make Mistakes" is enlivened by real-life stories of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you've hidden something important. Some of the improvement doubtless results from changes in technology and medical knowledge, but Hallinan makes a good case that it was also very important to simply recognise that people are inherently mistake-prone and then take steps to minimise the things that can go wrong. Then anaesthesiologists also took a page from the airline industry, they started using checklists to remind themselves to do important things, and they "flattened the authority gradient" by encouraging nurses and others in the operating room to point out errors. It turns out that we are biased, "poorly calibrated" (meaning, we often don't know our own limitations), very quick to judge other people on the basis of appearance alone, prone to sticking with old strategies that work poorly in new situations, and generally a lot more irrational than we think we are.
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Great information about why humans are so flawed.
—jessbear
