You Are Not So Smart (Pop-Rationality Book)

The viral promotional videos may be partly responsible. The other one is here.

One review says:

The book as a whole was like a manual of defining all the broken things, expounding on brokenness and moving on to another broken thing, all based on scientific research. No fixes. No suggestions.

I recall checking out the blog a while back, upon Lukeprog's recommendation via his blog, and leaving with a much lower opinion of the author after reading his post on the representativeness heuristic (causing me to classify him as pretty close to my model of Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini). If you check out the comment section, it looks like he thinks that your probability estimate in cases like the lawyer/engineer question should always track the frequency information you are given, because using your subjective stereotype information would be to "ignore statistics." Although I haven't bothered reading his stuff since, I expect that a careful look at his articles will reveal further such misunderstandings..

I'm unconvinced that the misattribution of arousal is not a feature.

Firstly, a woman that calmly stays on a scary bridge, may really be more worth having one-night-stand with, in evolutionary terms (taking care of children w/o the man, or at very least, combining your genes with dissimilar person). Secondarily when in danger it is a feature to take risks trying to reproduce. While it may well be that we do this by misattributing the arousal, which seems like an error, the end result may work, and evolution only cares about end result.

The arousal is here to modify your behaviour and it may be effective to modify behaviour in similar ways regardless of the source of the arousal.

Also, I'm unconvinced that in the experimental set up this even works by thinking - why were i so aroused - and then deciding, it must be woman, and calling her. Could be simply that in the aroused state (when the hormones are flowing through the blood) the sexual attraction is increased (the hormones latch onto receptor sites and increase the signal level for sexual attraction). That's clearly a simpler explanation. One should do this with rats and see. The rats probably do not think - "why the hell was i aroused, was it the female rat? she must be attractive, better give a call".

One one hand, You Are Not So Smart could bee a boon to Eliezer's popular rationality book by priming the market.

I'm actually a little worried that, with all the pop-sci rationality/cogbias books that have been coming out recently, the market might be getting bored of the topic.

Here is a list of recent pop-rationality books.

For more, here's a list of all posts at youarenotsosmart.com