The list of biases was the best part

Originally reviewed on Bookwyrm at https://books.theunseen.city/user/4thace/review/201642#anchor-201642

This was a book that started with a big idea - that much of our behavior is governed by cognitive biases we all share - but is realized as something that felt light and fluffy. The heart of the book is the list of 38 biases at the end which are linked to a list of life questions and to a set of entertaining real-life stories. These include things many of us have heard about such as "Dunning-Kruger Effect," "Sunk Cost Fallacy," and "Survivorship Bias" and a bunch I didn't know at first such as "Affective Forecasting" and "Hyperbolic Discounting." Each one has a few sentences of summary, a description of advantageous and disadvantageous aspects, a list of questions, and a few paragraphs of further nuance, illustrated with line drawings by the author.

The personal stories were the easy part to read, the rest was somehow daunting in scale and spare in details. It was as though you took a big ambitious book like The 48 Laws of Power and took out 95% of he historical anecdotes which flesh out the bare statements of principle. It wasn't trying to be a reference book delivering wisdom from the ages, but I think it would have been better if it gave guidance for the reader to find further information on the topics.