The Invisible Gorilla

The one good thing about international flights is I get a lot of reading done.

One of the books I finished reading was The Invisible Gorilla and other ways our intuition deceives us.

I believe I wanted to read this book after I had seen the invisible gorilla video that was forwarded to me by Kiki, a friend of mine who networks a lot.

The book has a few good points and a few points where the authors seem a bit confused.

Here are lessons I learnt from the book

• The amount of overconfidence is overwhelmingly high. People who are least knowledgeable think they know more most - people who are most knowledgeable suffer from overconfidence the least
• Confidence, wrongly, is treated as an honest signal of a person's professional skill. Unfortunately, the doctor example the authors quote for this, hasn't worked for me. I am going to ditch my doctor since I don't think she knows what she is talking about. I wish the authors gave statistics on incompetence (not just confidence, or the lack thereof)
• Less than 5% of tournament chess players are women - I gotta start practicing my chess skills again
• Teaching people who do worse than others on logical tests, to perform better, seems to reduce their overconfidence and helps them perform better
• A quote that touched me personally - "The very process of putting individuals together to deliberate before they reach a conclusion almost guarantees that the group's decision will not be the product of independent opinions and contributions. Instead, it will be influenced by group dynamics, personality conflicts, and other social factors that have little to do with who knows what and why they know it". This, the authors argue, leads to consensus with the false illusion of safety in numbers. In fact, they prove that 94% of the times, the answer is comes from the dominant person in the group who spoke first!
• Spending time on planning before implementation can reduce the illusion of knowledge. Spending time talking to folks who have worked on similar projects can also help be more accurate in estimates
• Tying with the sick society notion, the authors talk about how people suffering from depression, who are generally less optimistic, possibly have a more accurate view of the relationship between themselves and the world. I call this realistic
• Information can be deceiving - always ask if the information you are using to make a decision is relevant short term or long term. Most important decisions benefit from thinking long term
• Tying in to maya, the authors talk about brain porn - how images associated with articles can instill our faith in those articles as facts, even if the images might not be accurate. No wonder ascetics meditate with their eyes closed
• Correlation between two facts does not always mean causal relationship. The only way to see if a relationship is causal is to run an experiment
• The illusion of narrative reminded me of A whole new mind - when it talks about Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, where the author argued that all myths contain the same general ingredients and follow the same basic recipe. We hear are about a hero rescuing a chic in the movies a thousand times. And we still see movie after movie to essentially experience the same thing - that is how bad (or powerful) the illusion of narrative is!
• The authors talk about the illusion of potential in regards to human's utilizing only 10% of their brain. They argue that if that were the case, evolution would have gotten rid of the other 90% by now. In their defense, this precisely talks about the outright rejection of what cannot be measured
• Think hard for those logical decisions. Intuition is good for visceral (how does something taste) or emotional decisions

- Sonia