I’ve just about finished a leisurely reading, over the past month, of Rolf Dobelli’s book Die Kunst des klaren Denkens: 52 Denkfehler, die Sie besser anderen überlassen.
It’s a compilation of short newspaper articles (for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Schweizer Sonntags-Zeitung) that its Swiss author had published on common errors in reasoning that routinely get us fallible humans into trouble. Not precisely logical fallacies, in every case — which is what I thought it was when I grabbed it off a shelf last year in Interlaken, in a bookstore that I used to visit back when I was a missionary there — but simply stupid mistakes that we make in business decisions, investments, relationships, voting, and so forth.
It’s very well written and entertaining, sometimes humorous, and enormously practical. I like the German subtitle: “52 errors in thinking that you would be better off leaving to others.”
I like the book so very much, in fact, that I stupidly dropped an email to Rolf Dobelli a couple of weeks ago, asking whether I could translate his book into English.
Why do I say “stupidly”? Because I should have checked to see whether it had already appeared in English, and because I could easily have done so.
It has, as a matter of fact, already been published in English.
He wrote back fairly quickly, gently informing me of the book’s English title:
I just assumed that, since it had first been published auf Deutsch in 2014, it wouldn’t yet have appeared in English. But things move more rapidly these days than I had realized, I guess. Especially in the commercial world beyond the snail’s pace of academic publication.
I haven’t seen the English edition, but I assume that it’s a complete and accurate translation of the German original. And, if it is, I commend it enthusiastically to your attention.
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