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Become the master of your world
- Presents 20 key concepts, or keys, to aid critical thinking
- Authored by one of the world's most eminent psychologists - and founder of the Flynn Effect
- Looks at topics such as Race and IQ, "good" science and the current world economic crisis
- Written in a clear and lucid style, illustrated with many examples
- Sales Rank: #859413 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-03-29
- Released on: 2012-03-29
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Amazon.com Exclusive: The Critical Thinking Toolkit
James Flynn’s How to Improve your Mind sets forth strategies—20, to be exact—for understanding and interpreting the world around us. These include positive “key concepts,” ideas that help us analyze our world, and “anti-keys,” ideas that can get in the way of intelligently understanding the things around us.
Flynn looks at each of these keys in turn, using examples from across academic disciplines to illustrate how these concepts can be applied in real life. But what are these concepts? Here is a sampling of the tools that Flynn wants everyone to pack into their critical-thinking toolboxes:
- Universalizability. This key makes us think critically about our moral positions, and forces us to be logically consistent in our beliefs. This insistence on logical consistency becomes a major tool in debates on key issues like racism, human rights, and political beliefs.
- Charisma Effect. This key focuses on the human element in decision making, and highlights the important fact that data cannot always be taken at face value; there are often outside, immeasurable factors at play.
- Percentage. This key helps put things into perspective. As a way of condensing figures into an easily-understood ratio, percentage allows us to digest information that is otherwise difficult to comprehend, such as the mortality rate of a drug that may be fatal fifty cases in a million versus one that is fatal ten cases per thousand.
- National Identity. This key reminds us that each nation has its own unique social construct, and helps explain otherwise inexplicable (or illogical) actions or priorities on the level of national politics.
- Intelligent Design. This is an anti-key, in that it can easily lead to a dead end in lines of inquiry. Instead of encouraging research, reflection, or observation, this anti-key offers the easy way out: “it was designed that way.”
More information about each of these keys and anti-keys, along with the remaining 15 concepts, are available in How to Improve Your Mind.
Review
"Professor James Flynn sets a clever trap in his latest book, How to Improve Your Mind. Promising that all readers will "be far more able to defend their position after reading it than before", Flynn instead provides the critical tools necessary instead for reassessing the irrational beliefs each of us hold and, in so confronting, end them. For your own good, you should let yourself be trapped." Weekend Press, Christchurch
From the Back Cover
Each day our minds experience a deluge of conversation, lectures, newspapers, TV, the Internet, and more. But what should we really be paying attention to? James R. Flynn, world-renowned intelligence researcher and discoverer of the Flynn Effect (the phenomenon of rising global IQs over time), poses the most challenging question of all: Who is to be the master of all this information – you or the modern world? It is you, he claims, who must be the gatekeeper that filters out what is worth remembering. Otherwise you may find yourself at the mercy of a life that you can only manage day by day.
In How to Improve Your Mind, Flynn presents 20 key concepts to aid critical thinking: practical guidelines that will empower you to critically analyze what you read, what you hear, and what you see. You will gain a greater understanding of a wide range of topics that include contemporary race and IQ debates, what makes good science and history, why America and Israel behave as they do, and the origins of the current economic crisis. Flynn's "20 keys" translate into an invaluable toolkit enabling readers to make up their own minds about ethics, religion, history, economics, international politics, and even what they should eat. How to Improve Your Mind offers great insights into how to become an information master in the age of information overload.
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
A good not great book on critical thinking
By Abacus
This book teaches how to think critically. My rating reflects that I have come across many other books that provide more effective tools to filter the distortion of the Media. Those books include: Sherry Seethaler's Lies, Damned Lies, and Science: How to Sort Through the Noise Around Global Warming, the Latest Health Claims, and Other Scientific Controversies (FT Press Science). Her 20 tools summarized in the conclusion are far better than Flynn's 20 keys. Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought offers a more coherent framework with mindware gaps (similar to Flynn's keys) regarding the knowledge you must acquire to exercise critical judgment, and contaminated mindware (Flynn's anti-keys) that represent the myths you have to get rid off to exercise rational judgment. Sherman Stein's Survival Guide for Outsiders: How to protect yourself from politicians, experts, and other insiders is also much clearer and effective than Flynn. Gerd Gigerenzer's Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You is also superior. It focuses a lot on the Bayesian Theorem that Flynn completely ignores. Given that Bayesian statistics affect just about everything when it comes to hypothesis, probability, interpretation of medical tests, etc... this is a huge gap in Flynn's book.
Some of the choices of Flynn's 20 keys appear too narrow. If you were thinking of 20 most powerful tools to teach someone critical thinking would you include on this most selective list such concepts as: universalizability (1), tautology (2), and IQ (7). Actually, all the other 17 keys would not warrant a spot in the top 20 tools to teach critical thinking. This is for two reasons. First, those concepts are too narrow and sometimes even trivial on a stand-alone basis. Second, some of those concepts should be treated together to become meaningful. For example, several of Flynn's keys belong to an introduction in statistics and all his anti-keys would be covered by an explanation of the scientific method.
Flynn's book is certainly not all bad. It is often very good. Within the body of the book, despite his awkward 20 key selection for critical thinking, he does a good job of covering what it takes to think critically. His 5 part curriculum includes: 1) logic & philosophy, 2) statistics, 3) economics, 4) the scientific method, and 5) political sciences. Thus, Flynn invariably expands way beyond the narrow confine of his keys. Except for missing out on Bayesian statistics, Flynn does a good job of developing the necessary curriculum to think critically. However, any of the other books mentioned, for the most part, will get you there more effectively.
Some passages are excellent.
The first four chapters out of five on economics (The Market and its Church) are excellent. His explaining the nature of money, basic economics, money and banking, and the 2008 financial crisis are very good. His concept of assessment inflation and the failings of credit ratings are great.
Some sections within the statistics chapters are very good. He discloses within Box 6.1 (pg. 53) a great short cut to calculate the error margin of a poll I had never seen anywhere else. I tested, and it works. His explanation of the regression to the mean is also original and clear. His exploring confounding variables and the associated concept of "correlation does not entail causation" is also excellent.
Part 4 on the scientific method is excellent even if it is somewhat self-evident for anyone who has given this concept much consideration. How much time does one need to figure that Intelligent Design is not a scientific concept? Using Flynn's own semantic, is this not a bit too tautological?
Part 5 on political science is interesting. But, it over-reaches. Flynn admits foreign policy is a very complex arena that is hard to either predict or even understand using deterministic theories such as the ones he covers including: Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. This chapter sometimes seems like a venue for Flynn to express and justify his own political views on what nations should do. This is a very interesting but separate subject best treated in a different book. The other recommended books on critical thinking wisely did not tread on this murky domain.
Flynn is on weaker grounds when he offers economic recommendations and assessments.
His personal recommendations to resolve the 2008 crisis is wrong a full four years after the fact. He recommends that US banks should have been nationalized just as in England. Yet, four years later the US banking system is on far stronger financial footing than its counterparts in England or anywhere in Europe.
When Flynn foresees that "Europe may bring many US banks down, no matter what America does"; he overlooks that US banks have virtually no credit exposure to the European peripheral countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal). When he foresees that "we may see the most serious depression since the Great Depression" he simply extrapolates the vicious cycle of Government defaults and their associated insolvent banks worldwide. But, this situation is confined to the Euro Zone and has been confined for over four years. The relevant sovereign bond yield trends suggest the situation is getting better not worse.
In the conclusion, Flynn discloses that he developed a test to measure people's critical thinking proficiency: Flynn's Index of Social Criticism (FISC). It would have been most interesting if Flynn shared this test (or a shorter version of it) with his audience so readers could test whether they "got it" or not after reading this book. I suspect FISC is very challenging and would trip many sharp minds on various topics. I am sure when testing for his Sociologist's fallacy concept; it is most easy to trip on those questions.
A good deal of critical thinking can boil down to exploring just three questions. Is an issue resolvable by examining any data? Is the data supportive of the theory advanced? What is the quality of the data? And, the other recommended books provide more directly the tools to answer those questions.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful book on real world logic.
By Amazon Customer
Let me begin this review with a quotation from the Conclusion. I believe this one quote summarily states the overriding purpose Professor Flynn had for writing this book, "Every university worthy of the name believes that its graduates, whatever their specialties, should have the common good of a liberal mind. Therefore, they have programs called the "core curriculum," or the "general education requirement," or the "great books," or what have you. At present, these are opiates that dull our awareness of what we all know: no university educates as well as it pretends." Professor Flynn also states, "This book is a substitute for the diary you never kept at school or university. The concepts fall naturally into five groups: those associated with philosophy, the social sciences, economics, the nature of science, and international politics. The next 18 chapters will present them in that order. By the end, you will have a good tool kit."
"Unless you have concepts that make you feel confident that you can evaluate what you hear or read, your only defense is to stop listening... This book will give you 20 Key Concepts that will empower you to analyze critically what you read, what you hear, and what you see. Without them, your mind does not have a full tool kit to fashion your own views on ethics, religion, history, economics, international politics, even what you should eat... There is a difference between the conceptual tools you need to comprehend the modern world and integrating what you learn into a comprehensive vision." The 15 Key Concepts and five "Anti-Keys" are as follows: Universalizability, Tautology/ Falsifiability, Naturalistic Fallacy, Tolerance School Fallacy, Contrary to Nature, Random Sample, Intelligence Quotient or IQ, Placebo, Charisma Effect, Control Group, The Sociologist's Fallacy, Percentage, Market, Reality is a Text, Alternative Histories, Alternative Sciences, Intelligent Design, The National Interest, National Affinities, National Identity. "I call these 20 notions Key Concepts because they identify the keys that unlock the door to understanding the modern world, plus naming the anti-keys that do nothing except spread confusion."
As someone who majored in Philosophy in college, I truly appreciated this book by Professor Flynn. It couples real world examples with rock solid logic. Many of these examples serve to illustrate exactly the kind of fuzzy logic that permeates politics, religion, and the media - and for that I am grateful. The tone I got from reading this book is that of a man who has devoted his entire life to science and logical principles, only to be met with indifference and apathy by the general public. It seems that being the smartest man in the room can sometimes put one at a disadvantage. Regardless, I really admire Professor Flynn's enlightened righteous indignation. My only criticism of this book is that it could have used another once-over by the editor - it is littered with typos. Lastly, I don't always agree with every single viewpoint of Professor Flynn's, but I still really enjoyed it and would highly recommend it to those about to enter, or currently enrolled in, college. A lighter, but also useful book on the subject, would be The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Improves the mind, and your reading skills
By Godfrey
After watching an interview with Professor Flynn on some of his other work on IQ, I went looking for this publication. The book unfortunately has a title and front cover more in tune with a generalised self help book. That said it is superior to a number of books on critical reasoning and logic. My one point of contention with the book, and why I nearly subtracted a star, is based on style. The style is academic and heavy weight and because of this it is simply a difficult book to read. It would be hard to skim read this book before going back for a deeper read. You have to read carefully from the start. For instance I had to read the "Reality as a text" - and that was the introduction - several times before I understood the authors point. I appreciate the Professor Flynn is packing in alot into 192 pages, but the art is to take complexity, unbundle it, and bring it across in as simple a style as possible.
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