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Also of interest ... in erring humans
The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons; Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz; Not Exactly by Kees van Deemter; Quantum by Manjit Kumar
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
People have far more confidence in their powers of perception than neurobiologists Chabris and Simons think they should, said David Shaywitz in The Wall Street Journal. In 1999, the pair showed how test subjects, when paying attention to something else in a video, could miss something as obvious as a man in a gorilla suit. Here, they march through the many ways we deceive ourselves, offering “a thoughtful introduction” to a fascinating field.
Being Wrong
by Kathryn Schulz
(Ecco, $27)
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Journalist Kathryn Schulz wants us to wake up to our limitations, too, but mostly so we recognize that human error can be a useful tool for generating knowledge, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Schulz’s “funny and philosophical meditation” on our goof-ups makes the claim that being wrong is too common a predicament to be deemed a symptom of intellectual inferiority. She wants a world of less assured, more open-minded arguments, and “it’s lovely to see” how her shrewd, lively writing makes that idea take flight.
Not Exactly
by Kees van Deemter
(Oxford, $30)
Computer scientist Kees van Deemter champions our facility for vagueness, said John Gilbey in the LondonTimes. In this “amusing, persuasive” book, he reminds us that imprecision can be invaluable to conversations about such uncomfortable issues as poverty or obesity, and needn’t mean muddled thinking. A section on the challenges of creating computers that can manage vagueness as deftly as we do “adds significantly” to the larger argument.
Quantum
by Manjit Kumar
(Norton, $28)
Albert Einstein “was for many years regarded as a stubborn, even senile holdout” when he refused to accept the theory of quantum mechanics that fellow physicists outlined in the 1920s, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Manjit Kumar’s “challenging and trippy” new account of Einstein and Niels Bohr’s decades-long dialogue on the subject makes “the weird, protean, paradoxical subatomic world” nearly comprehensible—while suggesting that the jury is still out on whether Bohr’s understanding was truly correct.
