The Art of Thinking Clearly Chapters: Network Perspective
Recently I had the pleasure of reading The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. This book discusses 99 “thinking errors”. It is a great list of related thinking errors that we commit on a routine basis. The author discusses one cognitive error per chapter and gives a list of related chapters at the end of it.
I put together the list of chapters and data on related chapters. Below, I explore the two files treating them as linked/network data. The chapters list forms attributes data while data on relations between chapters forms links data.
Below is the top 10 chapters according to the number of total links recorded. Chapter 13, Story bias and Chapter 45, Self-serving bias are recorded as chapters with the highest number of links to other chapters. Story bias is the aspect where we try to “fit” or create an understanding of issues/events afterwards. Using words of the author, Self-serving bias may simply be explained as below:
“.. we attribute success to ourselves and failures to external factors.”
| chapter_id | chapter_label | links_tot |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | Story bias | 18 |
| 45 | Self-serving bias | 18 |
| 23 | Endowment effect | 16 |
| 40 | Forecast illusion | 16 |
| 11 | Availability bias | 15 |
| 1 | Survivorship bias | 14 |
| 7 | Confirmation bias I | 14 |
| 8 | Confirmation bias II | 14 |
| 10 | Contrast effect | 14 |
| 26 | Neglect of probability | 14 |
The graph below shows links between chapters. Points show chapters while the arrows/links are present when there is a link between two chapters. Points are sized according to the number of links reported for the respective point. Chapters with the largest point size are as presented in Table 1 above. Generally, the graph follows the pattern of complex pattern rather than centralized or decentralized pattern. Theoretically, one may trace to any other chapter from any given point.
