The Art Of Thinking Clearly

In Chapters 11-20, Dobelli continues charting the mental distortions that shape perception, decision-making, and judgment. These essays move from cognitive illusions of memory and meaning toward the broader social and structural traps that reinforce human error.

In “Why We Prefer a Wrong Map to None at All: Availability Bias,” Dobelli shows how the mind mistakes vivid examples for accurate data. He writes, “We create a picture of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind” (30), capturing how familiarity masquerades as frequency. Dramatic dangers—plane crashes or terror attacks—dominate mental “risk maps,” while quiet threats like illness or debt remain invisible. In other words, humans rely on what is easiest to recall, not what is most probable. This same impulse drives the it’ll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better fallacy, the subject of “Why ‘No Pain, No Gain’ Should Set Alarm Bells Ringing.” Here, Dobelli outlines how experts, politicians, and consultants shield bad predictions with claims that conditions must deteriorate before they improve. Dobelli advises measuring progress with verifiable milestones rather than vague promises of eventual improvement.

“Even True Stories Are Fairy Tales: Story Bias” discusses the tendency to impose narrative meaning on events that are random or complex, while “Why You Should Keep a Diary: Hindsight Bias” considers the belief that past events were more predictable than they actually were.