Good Thinking

What You Need to Know to Be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser

By: Guy P. Harrison

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Critical-thinking skills are essential for life in the 21st century. In this follow-up to his introductory guide Think, and continuing his trademark of hopeful skepticism, Guy Harrison demonstrates in a detailed fashion how to sort through bad ideas, unfounded claims, and bogus information to drill down to the most salient facts. By explaining how the human brain works and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment.

Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled. We all suffer from cognitive biases, embellished memories, and the tendency to kowtow to authority figures or be duped by dubious "truths" packaged in appealing stories. And as primates we are naturally status seekers, so we are prone to irrational beliefs that seem to enhance our senses of belonging and ranking. Emotional impulses and stress also all too often lead us into traps of misperception and bad judgment. Understanding what science has discovered about the brain makes you better equipped to cope with its built-in pitfalls.

Good Thinking - the book and the practice - makes clear that with knowledge and the right thinking skills, anyone can lead a safer, wiser, more efficient, and productive life.

©2015 Guy P. Harrison (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"Very useful.... Harrison demonstrates the need for critical analysis in a world of conflicting stories and glib 'facts.'" ( Publishers Weekly)

Good summary of logical thinking

No new ideas, but a good rationale for adopting critical thinking, as well as some of the fallacies that trip us up every day.

Thinking is a dying art

Why is common sense and questioning what you know is fundamentally right becoming endangered? Why are the thought processes which are the foundation of our knowledge base being eroded ? It’s time to question why we are allowing what we know to be replaced by popular opinions rather than fact. An interesting take on critical thinking and why to not accept mediocrity.

science as a religion

no a bad book, generally enjoyable.
however it is dogmatic about science.
the author ask you to think critical, but not if it is on a subject that he finds to be absurd or not relevant.
This is a book about the religion of science.

A very needed work

The ideas presented in this book are timely and critically needed in our world today. They are well presented for the most part. There is some irony with the placement of chapter 10 - an over-generalized discussion if “alternative@ vs “scientific” medicine that exemplifies “confirmation bias” - after chapter 9 - a discussion of confirmation and other biases.

The author also seems to expect that critical thinking will lead to globalism and overlooks opposing motives of political or commercial gain. Cf J Haight “The Righteous Mind”

The saddest reality here is that the audience most likely to benefit from this book is the one least likely to pick it up.