The Art of Thinking Clearly

Dobelli presents ninety-nine cognitive errors in short chapters of two or three pages each, each naming a bias, illustrating it and giving a brief instruction on avoiding it.

The coverage includes survivorship bias, swimmer's body illusion which confuses selection with effect, the clustering illusion, social proof, sunk cost, reciprocity, confirmation bias, authority bias, contrast effect, availability, the story bias, hindsight, overconfidence, the chauffeur knowledge distinction between people who know a subject and people who can perform knowing it, base rate neglect, regression to the mean, outcome bias, the paradox of choice, endowment, groupthink, neglect of probability, scarcity error, and many others. The format is designed for reference rather than for sequential reading, and Dobelli says so.

The book is entirely derivative. Nearly every chapter restates work by Kahneman, Tversky, Taleb, Cialdini or Gigerenzer, and Dobelli was publicly criticised by Taleb and by Gigerenzer for the extent of the borrowing without adequate attribution in the original German edition. Several of the underlying findings have replicated poorly, and the compressed format leaves no room to indicate which. The instructions on avoiding each bias are brief to the point of uselessness, since knowing about a bias does not prevent it.

Its value is as an index. A reader who wants a name for a pattern they have observed will find it here quickly, and can then go to the primary sources. Anyone who has read Kahneman and Cialdini will find nothing new.