MAIN IDEA:

This book reviews all kinds of reasons, mainly psychological, that caused people to make blunders. Here is the author’s description of its main idea:” Blunder is a book about judgment calls. It is the story of how smart people like Edison get caught in cognition traps and wind up defeating themselves. Most complex problems have complex causes, and no single factor can explain it all. This book offers one possible explanation for why people blunder. I suggest that we all sometimes fall into “cognition traps”—rigid ways of approaching and solving problems.4 Cognition traps are inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning. They are the stolid ways in which people approach and solve problems based on preconceived notions and preset patterns of thought.

The author also defines three different types of problems that cause people to make poor decisions and implement actions that lead to failure: mistakes, blunders, and cognition traps: ” A mistake is simply an error arising from incorrect data, like believing that an electric wire is running direct current when it’s actually on AC. A blunder, in contrast, is a solution to a problem that makes matters worse than before you began, like attempting to discredit a potentially liberating technology rather than adapting to it. Finally, a cognition trap is the mental framework that led you to a blunder, like the one I call static cling, the refusal to accept that a fundamental change is under way.”  The book allocates one chapter to each of the 9 most typical problems that cause blunders.

MY TAKE ON IT:

This is quite an interesting collection of cases in which human psychology caused behavior problems that resulted in negative and sometimes deadly consequences. The book is big on factoids but relatively low on proposed solutions. I am actually more interested in solutions. To a significant extent, I think these problems are caused by the lack of education. I do not mean formal education, which is often nothing more than a combination of indoctrination with low levels of technical skills, such as reading, writing, and doing some formalized algorithmic tasks. It would be much better to expand education to game-playing that emulates real-life situations and provides timely and effective feedback on individual actions, pretty much like it is done naturally by children when they are not disturbed. It is probably coming with massive implementation of AI tools and a shift to decision-making to AI models trained on the many situations relevant to skills and behavior patterns needed to avoid blunders.