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<br><br>
<h1 class="header center white-text text-lighten-2">William Ronchetti</h1>
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<h5 class="header col s12 light">You Are Not So Smart</h5>
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<p>
The other day I was rummaging through a few things in the office next to my bedroom at home when I came across a book with a peculiar title - 'You Are Not So Smart,' by David McRaney. The classic saying 'never judge a book by it's cover' apparently didn't hit home hard enough when I picked it up and read the title. I found myself asking if this book was attempting to mock me into reading it. With phrases such as 'Why you have too many Facebook friends' on the cover, I found myself intrigued and gave it a chance. After a few pages of the first chapter on priming, I was hooked.
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Two days later, I've now finished the book. It turns out this book was given to my younger brother, who is a junior in high school, by his English teacher. Suspiciously the corner of a page about halfway through the book was folded down, leading me to believe he never actually finished it. It's a shame because I found the book to be eye opening and in addition has given me the ability to recognize the shortcuts we as humans use in the way we think every day. Armed with this knowledge I now feel I'm much better prepared to navigate every day life and not fall for the common mistakes in reasoning people use every day.
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You may be thinking to yourself, especially if you're around my age - who reads books anymore anyway? Nowadays I'm finding fewer and fewer of my peers read at all. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of friends I have who have read a book at all in the last year, and many will admit not doing so since even before high school. Are you thinking to yourself this is probably the case generally as well based on your experiences? If so, you've just committed a logical fallacy touched on in the book, fueled by what is known as the availility heuristic. The availability heuristic is a way of thinking we use to make generalizations about things in our lives based on the examples we can readily think of. As someone who is highly educated in a technical field, I truly believed I was smart enough to out-smart a lot of the tactics used to influence our behavior, when in fact this is not generally the case at all. It turns out, I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was.
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<p>
Still not convinced this book may be worth your time? Let's see if I can blow your mind some other way. There's an experiment touched on in the book that was particularly shocking to me. A study was done on undergraduate Enology (wine) majors that showed their extensive training could be fooled quite easily. A number of experiments were conducted where these students would taste two different bottles of wine and describe the flavors and apparent quality. The catch of the first experiment was that the students were told both wines were red, and their analysis agreed with this - except that one of the wines was actually white and just had been dyed red. All their training had been fooled simply by telling them what to expect.
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Another variation of this experiment was conducted with expensive wine and cheap wine, and if you're betting where I'm going with this, in this case you're probably right (but most of the time you're wrong, as the book points out). Yup, you guessed it - even professional wine connoisseurs can be fooled into not just thinking cheap wine is expensive wine - but actually describing completely different palets for the same wine just by pouring two glasses and telling them one was cheap and one was expensive, when in fact they were both cheap. If experts can be fooled simply by creating a sense of expectation, how smart do you think you really are?
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Read the damn book. Just do it. You'll thank me later. You can check out his website <a href="https://youarenotsosmart.com/" target='_blank'>here</a> for more info.
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