The mantra over the past decade for most of us sounds something like: "I can't believe he just did that ... Did she really just say that? ... What were the thinking when they ...?" The shock value never seems to subside when we hear the words said or see the actions taken by politicians, pundits, other so-called celebrities, and those closer to us: our teachers, managers, coworkers, teammates, friends, and family members. In her first book, Thinking 101, Yale professor Woo-kyoung Ahn dissects not only the flawed thinking of such pronouncements and positions but the reasons behind them.
Ahn observes with detailed personal, professional, and historical examples that faulty causal attribution often leads to rash judgments. She asserts that we can avoid irrational judgments by adhering to three concepts: the law of large numbers ("in most cases"), regression toward the mean ("forget the outliers"), and Baye's theorem ("experience tells me"). She deliberates on each of these principles in depth to underscore their usefulness in critical thinking.
Ahn devotes a good part of the book to confirmation bias, a reflexive tendency of judgment that has contributed to many deaths, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. and negativity bias, our natural inclination to skew our thinking away from positive outcomes. She explains the value of these propensities when quick-thinking under pressure is essential, yet she does not stray from their often-disastrous consequences. Ahn insists that delayed gratification, while hard to achieve, is vital to cultivating advanced thinking and career development.
Readers looking for theories and applications of critical thinking may ask for more from Thinking 101, but this book serves as a useful guide to why so many of us these days ignore facts underlying contemporary issues and, worse, distort them.
