Four stars for Pinker’s always clear and incisive writing style, as well as for the importance of the subject matter. If nothing else, I hope readers who’d never really thought about rationality as a choice they could make are exposed to the concepts covered here.

As far as the concepts themselves, for readers who’ve already encountered writers like Kahneman, Shermer, Sperber, or books like Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset, and some of Pinker’s own earlier writing, much of this will be familiar. Nevertheless, topics such as cognitive biases, probability, and logical reasoning certainly deserve to be revisited and emphasized, even for those of us who’d like to think we’ve learned these lessons before. 

I found myself again arguing against the indictment of rationality suggested by the “Linda problem” (p. 26) and agreeing that the variety of “trolley problems” cry out for alternative solutions beyond what experimenters expect. So I was gratified to read Pinker’s assessment that looking for such loopholes is “exactly the rational thing one would do in real life” (p. 97). I found myself again taken in by the discussion of the probability of cancer given a diagnosis (p. 150) and impressed with how much more intuitive the problem becomes when translated into concrete numbers (p. 169). 

So there’s a lot of great material here, and the fantastic writing makes it a pleasure to absorb; the added bonus is that the more of us who get this into our heads, the better the chance we have of truly making the world a better place.