Saturday, February 14, 2015

This Will Make You Smarter

This Will Make You Smarter is a collection of essays written by a number of people deemed to be at the cutting edges of their fields. Each essay seeks to answer the question of what concept would improve one's cognitive toolkit.

It's an interesting format for a book. You end up with widely disparate views on what different thinkers believe is the most important scientific concept. Unfortunately, that also leads to problems as some authors directly contradict each other. I found the lack of a unifying viewpoint or theme kind of disturbing as there were just too many authors and they all veered in their own directions.

Because there were so many authors, I also found many of the concepts rather abstract. I find concepts make more of an impact on me when they are illustrated with examples or case studies, but because no author got much room, the concept-to-example ratio was a little bit on the low side for my liking. I probably didn't quite grasp as many concepts as I would have liked to.

Nonetheless, many of the concepts discussed are indeed important to know, and I see that many Amazon reviewers are big fans of the book, so you may like it nevertheless.

No comments: