“Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It” by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

A fascinating book that looks at why people often fall for tricks and scams that, usually on hindsight, appear so obvious. As the authors explain, it is due to our natural tendency to believe what we see or accept what we have being told as the truth. What this book does is show how scammers take advantage of this tendency, and also try to equip the reader with the necessary ways to look closer or dig deeper for more information to reveal the scam.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part covers the habits we use that make us fall for scams. These habits are:

• focusing too much on what is being presented. This leads us to exclude or ignore other information that would reveal the scam. A prime example is survivorship bias, where we only have information on those who make it (how to be a non-graduate billionaire), but not on those who don’t (excluding the experience of numerous non-graduates that never go on to become billionaires).
• predictions that follow our expectations, leading us to not scrutinize the actual results, leading to researchers to falsify data so that the results are what are expected for the study to fulfil their research grants or get better positions on the strength of the studies.
• being committed to our version of events, leading us to discount evidence that contradicts it. This could lead to false memories of events and belief in conspiracy theories because reality doesn’t match the false memory. We also become more critical only of views that don’t match our expectations.
• efficiency is the tendency for us to accept things at face value, rather than trying to look for more information to back up the views, like accepting that some people may be good at chess or exams without realizing they may be cheating. If we are already committed to a course of action, even if it is a scam, we may find it hard to back out, because the ‘sunk costs’ makes it more efficient to continue the course of action.

The second part looks at the hooks scammers use to make us believe whatever is being presented.

• consistent data that makes us believe that something must be correct (because it is consistent). Only, in real life, there is always noise in data, so data that is too consistent should be considered suspicious.
• familiarity with the way things are advertised allows scammers to present something that looks familiar but is actually a scam: fake websites that look similar to actual bank websites, for example.
• precision makes us think the results must be true because the results are so precise. Perhaps too precise: studies that present impossibly precise results should be suspect, as the data cannot back up the precision.
• the potency of a social intervention to make us believe it must be valid since it has such a huge effect. Again, the data may show that this potency was exaggerated or only done on a small scale and thus, may not be valid for the general population.

The authors also present ways to see through the scams, from asking for more data, asking the right questions or looking at the scam presentations in a new way that would reveal the contradictions or missing information that would show that what is being shown is not the truth.

Book read from 2024/01/08 to 2024/01/16