Talk to The Art of Thinking Clearly like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Rolf Dobelli is a Swiss entrepreneur and novelist who wrote a series of short newspaper columns on cognitive biases, later collected and expanded into this book. Each chapter covers one bias or logical error — ninety-nine in total — with a brief explanation and practical examples. The format is accessible and the coverage is broad, making it one of the more useful single-volume catalogs of reasoning errors available.
The biases Dobelli covers range across several categories: cognitive shortcuts and heuristics, social biases, logical fallacies, and errors of motivation. Social proof, survivorship bias, the sunk cost fallacy, confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, authority bias, the halo effect, and action bias are among the most prominent. He draws on Kahneman and Tversky, Cialdini, and the behavioral economics literature throughout, translating academic findings into digestible form.
What it gets right
- 1.
Survivorship bias: we observe only successes, not failures. Business advice based on successful companies, or life advice based on successful people, ignores the unseen failures that also followed the same strategy.
- 2.
Sunk cost fallacy: past investments that cannot be recovered should not influence current decisions. Continuing a project because of what has already been spent rather than what it will produce is economically irrational.
- 3.
Confirmation bias: we search for and weight evidence that supports existing beliefs, and discount evidence that challenges them. This operates in both information gathering and memory.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Rolf Dobelli is a Swiss entrepreneur, novelist, and co-founder of getAbstract, a service that summarizes business books. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of St. Gallen and is the author of several novels. The Art of Thinking Clearly was a bestseller in Germany before being translated into English. He also wrote The Art of the Good Life, which extends the bias-focused approach to questions of personal strategy and purpose.
