Thinking Straight: Fallacies, Biases, and the Numbers That Fool Us
The errors behind bad decisions, each taught through a case where it cost someone something. It covers the ways an argument fails, from Aristotle’s thirteen fallacies to the tobacco companies’ 1954 ‘Frank Statement’ graded line by line; correlation against causation, through the vaccine scare built on twelve children and the hormone therapy that observational studies got backwards; chance and the base rate, from what a positive mammogram means to Sally Clark’s ‘1 in 73 million’; the cases that never got counted, from Wald’s bombers to the Literary Digest’s millions of ballots against Gallup’s thousands; the halo effect, from Thorndike’s ‘constant error’ to the board that made Theranos credible; seeing what we expect, anchors, and frames; memory, hindsight, and the planning fallacy; overconfidence, from Tetlock’s superforecasters to the lawyers sanctioned for citing cases an AI invented; and crowds and tribes, from Asch’s lines and the Challenger to the arithmetic of when a crowd is wise. Where the field argues, over the hot hand, whether corrections backfire, nudges, the Dunning–Kruger effect, replication, whether people are irrational at all, and whether debiasing works, both cases come before the evidence. Closes with a checklist for any claim and the dates to watch.