Most of the essays are only a page or two, so this is a good book to delve into at random. (In fact that’s what Grayling recommends. I always ignore recommendations like that though — I’m a “begin-at-the-beginning” kind of guy.) They are grouped into three categories: Virtues and Attributes (such as Fear, Death, and Blame); Foes and Fallacies (Racism, Christianity, Capitalism); and Amenities and Goods (Education, Reading, Age). The essays originally appeared as newspaper columns, so there is some repetition and a few rough edges — the book could do with a bit of editing.

As a liberal (but not Liberal) intellectual, Grayling’s general views on many topics are not hard to guess. However, his points are nicely nuanced — I do like his slightly ambiguous take on Capitalism, for example. And what makes this book really enjoyable is the writing, which is rich and evocative. Here’s an excerpt from the essay on Love.

People attempt love as climbers attempt Everest; they scramble along, and end by camping in the foothills, or half-way up, wherever their compromises leave them. Some get high enough to see the view, which we know is magnificent, for we have all glimpsed it in dreams.

Indeed, our compromises leave us in the gutter, but our dreams have us looking at the stars. Beautiful.

Kahneman suggests thinking of the mind as composed of two notional systems: the fast-thinking, intuitive System 1; and the slow, deliberate, accurate but lazy System 2. The interplay between these two results in the amazing, yet often incomprehensible, behaviour of our minds.

There are a lot of ideas in this book, and many of these resonated with me. Here are just a few.

“When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”

Base rate neglect: when presented with evidence for a normally rare occurrence, we often simply evaluate the evidence, while ignoring the rarity of the event. My favourite example is a test for a one-in-a-million disease, where the test is 99.9% accurate. You take the test and it says you have the disease. You may now be worried, but your chance of having the disease is still only 0.1% (that’s one in a thousand). The positive result for the test means you’re now 1000 times more likely to have the disease, but the base rate of 1/1000000 is so low that you’re still almost certainly fine.

The idea of regression to the mean is very powerful. It’s a mathematical fact that, given any two incompletely correlated observations, the second is likely to be closer to the (mean) average than the first. The pretty much follows from the definition of “mean”. Regression to the mean explains a huge number of otherwise mysterious things, such as why punishment appears to work better than praise, and why intelligent women tend to marry less intelligent men.

However, we tend not to take regression to the mean into account, and it leads to our being surprised when apparent patterns in our observations turn out not to be real.

Kahneman gives a fairly simple way of estimating the expected correlation between events (such as last weeksend’s football score and this weekend’s) and thus how to make unbiased predictions. With enough practice you should be be able to train your mind to overcome this particular bias.

Hindsight bias and the resulting Illusion of understanding lead us to believe we understand a lot more about past events that we really do. Looking back it seems “obvious” that Google or South Korea or Tiger Woods would become so amazingly successful. But in reality it was as unpredictable then is it is obvious now. This is ignored by the purveyors of most business books — Kahneman says, “these stories induce and maintain an illusion of understanding, imparting lessons of little enduring value to readers who are all to eager to believe them.”

Simple formulas are as reliable as complex formulas or even expert judgement in many cases. Kahneman’s example is the Apgar test, a very quick and simple way of assessing a newborn baby’s health. As a rough-and-ready, simple, but broadly accurate measure, it has saved countless lives since its introduction. Simple tests like this are effective because they tend to be accurate enough, and crucially are simple enough that busy people actually use them. Similarly, Atul Gawande describes how checklists can fill the same role in his book The Checklist Manifesto.

The Planning Fallacy is simply the idea that we can make accurate forecasts about our future plans. We plan a project of some sort and try to be as accurate as possible about how long all the steps will take. Invariably the whole thing ends up taking twice as long anyway. This is nicely summed up by Hofstadter’s Law:

It always takes longer than you think it will take, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

The way to defeat this vicious circle is to use reference class forecasting, also called the “outside view” or “evidence-based forecasting”. It’s also called “yesterday’s weather” from the idea that you can make a fairly accurate weather forecast simply by predicting that today’s weather will be the same as yesterday’s.

So when forecasting how long a project will take, simply consider the last similar project you did, and that’s how long your new project will take. “But,” I hear you say, “last time that big unexpected disaster happened right in the middle of the project and that’s why it took so long!” And you probably think such a disaster won’t happen this time. Just like you thought last time, which is why you underestimated how long it would take.

Kahneman talks a bit about regret, and how to avoid it. He pretty much goes with the strategy I have used for some years. So, often I find myself about to decide on some course of action based on the assumption that some low-probability event won’t happen. For example, should I insure my mobile phone against loss? Should I buy the expensive carseat for my child even though seatbelts are probably good enough? In each case, I imagine the unlikely event occurring, and ask myself how much I will regret making my choice. If I don’t insure my phone and lose it, I will be annoyed, but I will recognise that I took a gamble and hey, life’s too short to worry about insuring your phone. But if my child is injured in a car accident I will not forgive myself for not making a decent effort to keep him safe.

So as Kahneman suggests, I imagine feeling the regret and see if it would make me want to change my decision. Of course, this is not infallible, but it has worked well for me so far in many minor situations.

(On carseats for children, see also Steven Levitt’s TED talk and have fun spotting the flaws in his argument.)

It has long annoyed me that car mileage is often quoted in miles per gallon. One reason this irritates me is that even in the 21st century, so many people still insist on measuring in miles and gallons rather than kilometres and litres. But the other reason is that it’s the wrong way around. People who measure efficiency care about the cost of the fuel and the amount of fuel burned: in other words, they care about the fuel rather than the distance, and the lower, the better. The purpose of driving s car is to travel over distances, and the way to measure efficiency is to measure how much fuel is required to drive those distances: in other words, litres per kilometre (or gallons per mile, if you must).

Kahneman points this out too, and gives some good examples of how misleading it is to think in terms of MPG, and how GPM is a far more intuitive concept. I don’t know if we’ll ever make the switch though.

So after reading this book, I feel I understand a lot more about how my mind works and how it should work. Even so, I still empathise with my 5 year old son’s precociously wise words:

I understand everything. Except myself.

— Felix (@talkingfelix) May 31, 2012

This book is almost 50 years old, but its technique is still good today. I’ve read these ideas in various other current books and on the web, so it seems that many people are discovering it even today. It does seem to make sense, and for me at least it works.

The Guardian called The Fall “the most perfect of his meditations on human isolation and bewilderment before an enigmatic universe.” Yet for all that, I really enjoyed it. It even made me laugh in some places. Well, smile at least. Grimly.

I wasn’t excited by this book when it first appeared, even when the movie version duly arrived. But I loved the Dust Brothers’ single “This is Your Life”, which consisted of a collection of rants by the character Tyler Durden with electronic accompaniment. I loved the result, which sounds like some twisted motivational speech or a dystopian self-help tape. (“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake!” etc.) I made a mental note to read the book. And now, barely 12 years later, I finally have. It’s not for the squeamish though — the descriptions of the fights are graphic enough to discourage me from watching the film version. I think I’ll listen to the Dust Brothers again.

At the beginning he offers five truly great books:

• Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Erich Maria Remarque, Spark of Life
• Calder Willingham, End as a Man

The rest of the book goes through several categories of books (mostly fiction) from various times and places, describing the work of some important authors and calling out 200 of the books that he feels are particularly good. Eliminating books I have already read, I have extracted my own list of the books that appeal to me. Here they are, with very brief summaries of Flynn’s descriptions.

19 Calder Willingham, The Gates of Hell (1951) “Short stories and non-fiction” — he had a “biting wit”
23 Calder Willingham, End as a Man (1947) The “greatest novel” portraying contemporary American college life
29 E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975) “A great novelist”, this novel “is done wonderfully well”
34 Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998)
36 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948) Mailer’s “one good novel”
46 Dorothy M. Johnson, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance short stories; she has a “spare style”
50 Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) “I have never met anyone who did not love reading it.”
63 Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) the source of the early civil rights movement in the USA
72 Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) “the dark side of American life”
73 Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust (1939) a tragic novel about Hollywood
76 Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (1983)
84 Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) “The prose reads as if Wilder were under a spell cast upon him by the characters”
92 V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (1962) about the West Indies — “a master of English prose”
94 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
106 Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939) “pure poetry”
117 Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950)
124 Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk (1957) The publisher calls this “the best book of the twentieth century”
127 Erich Maria Remarque, Spark of Life (1952) “so moving that you can hardly bear to turn the pages”
129 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924) is Mann’s “masterpiece”
147 Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (1924) a play demonstrating “the Russian soul”
155 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
169 Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (2002) “You are gripped by a nightmare…”
199 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave (1962) “most days, I think it is the best novel I have ever read”

These are the books I will look for when I need something new to read. I’m not going to set myself any sort of challenge to read them — that seems to be the wrong approach. Some people are more ambitious though: Reading the Torchlight List documents one person’s journey through all 200 books. Sadly, she seems to have stalled after two books. Still, that’s two more than I have managed so far.

I’ll post notes on each book as and when I read them. In the meantime, why not read The Torchlight List yourself, and be inspired to read some great books.

The result is a book of stories and observations from many years of living and walking in various places. But it’s shot through with stories, essays and poems about the Christchurch earthquakes, and earthquakes through history.

The Broken Book is intimate, clever, learned, moving and wise.

Fiona Farrell’s website has some interesting podcasts about this book and her work in general.

When we make a mistake, our self-image (I am smart and moral) conflicts with the facts (I just did a stupid and bad thing). This leads to feelings of cognitive dissonance, which our minds find intolerable. To reduce the dissonance, we should change our self-image (I am smart but sometimes I do stupid things). But instead, we try to change the facts (it wasn’t really a bad thing because it was for their own good and only I was smart enough to realise that).

This book is based on this premise and explores it with many studies and anecdotes. It can explain prevaricating politicians, false memory syndrome, and why people confess to crimes they did not commit.

We all fail to own up to mistakes sometimes. But it is fun to keep this book in mind when listening to a politician trying to sell some hare-brained scheme. You still won’t understand what they say, but at least you’ll understand why they are saying it.

The book’s official site has a little essay written by the author, describing the ideas that went into the book and how it was written. Don’t read it until you’ve read the book though.

Even though it’s short, The 10pm Question is clever, funny, thoughtful and wise. I loved it.

The thing I really liked is the idea of maintaining a Library of Candidates, a fancy name for the pile of books you own but have not yet read. Having lots of unread books has always seemed like a bad thing to me. I have thought of it like a large pile of clothes that have to be ironed, as if reading books were an arduous chore instead of a pleasure. Instead, I should revel in the number of unread books on my shelf, secure in the knowledge that I won’t run out. I will keep all such books together on my shelves, so I can easily choose one during those happy moments when I have time to start a new book.

This won’t really help me with my ironing, but at least it’s a start.

This book also recommends audiobooks as a way to read more. It would be great for people who drive alone a lot, but I never do. My available audio time is when I’m either walking to or from work, or doing some chore like washing the dishes. This barely gives me enough time to listen to the Philosophy Bites and RSA podcasts, as well as various Radio New Zealand podcasts. So audiobooks are pretty much out of the question.

Book clubs are a good way of forcing you to start and continue with a book, as well as putting you onto books that you otherwise wouldn’t have read. They are also a nice way of getting you to go outside, squinting in the unfamiliar sunlight on your way to your book club meeting instead of sitting in your comfortable squashy armchair, curled up with a good book and a lukewarm, forgotten cup of tea. Or maybe that’s just me.

Now, some people think writing notes in books is only a notch above burning them. I used to think along these lines, but I have been fascinated by annotations in books so many times that I am now a firm believer in handwriting in books. I fondly imagine some great-grandchild of mine in years to come, opening a book and seeing some incisive comment written in my handwriting. And hopefully not thinking, “who’s that vandal who ruined this book?”

Happy as I was to stumble upon this book, it is pretty light reading. I’ve heard that the real classic is “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler and and Charles Van Doren. I’ll be seeking that one out soon. And one day I will read a book that isn’t about reading books.