Books and
Cooks West
April 2004
Inevitable Illusions
by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds
by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Michele's place
Saturday, April 10 at 5:30 PM
Fennel ricotto, green salad, barley / green bean salad, garlic bread, red wine, chocolate chip cookies
Our rating: 2.5 cups of tea!
From Library Journal
Minimally, how many people must there be
in a room to allow a better than 50 percent chance that two of them
will have the same birthday? Your answer may reveal the presence of a
cognitive illusion-a mental tunnel that confounds rational thought.
Piattelli-Palmarini, director of the Cognitive Science Institute in
Milan and a research associate at MIT, offers fascinating examples of
such illusions to show how spontaneous, intuitive judgment can lead us
astray. Our failure to grasp basic probability, for example, can lead
to catastrophic decisions in law and medicine. The author describes the
seven deadly mental sins and suggests ways to overcome bias and "mental
sloth." This thoughtful, often disturbing book will challenge even
those readers with a firm grounding in probability and statistics. For
academic and large public libraries.
