A review by spookysoto
Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dan Ariely

2.0

Rating: 2.5 Meh
Format: Audiobook
Non-fiction November 2023


This started strong but ended up being repetitive, but I still found it interesting.

For a book about biases the author is too biased, that's the irony and the worst part of it.

This were the most interesting parts for me:

“How can you prove that your sister is not a prostitute when you don’t even have a sister?”


Hanlon’s razor. The original Hanlon’s razor states, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Occam’s razor. The basic idea of Occam’s razor is that the simplest explanation with the fewest moving parts is the one we should favor, until it is proven inadequate. Just to be clear, Occam’s razor does not say that the simplest explanation is always the right one, only that when we don’t have any data to help us pick one explanation over another, we should pick the simplest one.

The principle of the pain of paying, which posits that it hurts to part with cash but it hurts less when we don’t see or pay attention, helps us understand why we overspend when we use credit cards; why we feel worse at the end of a meal when we pay with cash compared with a credit card; why we sometimes prefer all-inclusive vacations even if they are more expensive; why we often go over budget when we renovate our homes; and much more.

Proportionality bias is the idea that when we are faced with a large event, we implicitly assume that such an event must have been caused by proportionally large causes. The reality of life is that often “shit happens” without any rhyme or reason. Randomness and luck (including bad luck) are important forces in the universe, as is human stupidity, but this is an unnatural way for us to think. We look for reasons, for causes, and when something is larger, we look for larger causes. Interestingly, the proportionality bias does not seem to apply to positive events. When amazing inventions are developed, such as penicillin, Post-it Notes, X-rays, Teflon, Viagra, and many others, we’re very comfortable attributing them to chance. In other words, when it comes to major good things, compared with major bad things, we are much likelier to believe that “shit happens.”

The third psychological reason favoring complexity is the desire for unique knowledge.

Together, all of these forces pull the misbelievers away from Occam’s razor and closer to Macco’s razor (the complete opposite of Occam’s razor), which states that “The most complex solution that involves the most devious intentions and the most hidden elements is almost always the truth.”

Hitchens’ razor, named after Christopher Hitchens, the late literary critic, journalist, contrarian, and staunch atheist: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”