You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David Mcraney

panned. For instance, this is how one reviewer described Moby Dick in 1851:
    This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed. We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book. Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.
    —HENRY F. CHORLEY, IN London Athenaeum
    This book is now considered one of a handful of great American novels and is held up as an example of the best pieces of literature ever written. Chances are, though, no one can truly explain why.

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    The Availability Heuristic
    THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples.
    THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.
    Do more words begin with “r” or have “r” as the third letter?
    Think about it for a second—rip, rat, revolver, reality, relinquish. If you are like most people, you think there are more that begin with “r”—but you’re wrong. More words in the English language have the letter in the third position than in the first—car, bar, farce, market, dart. It is much easier to believe the first option because it takes more concentration to think of words with “r” in the third position. Try it.
    If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could be enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.
    The human mind is generated by a brain that was formed under far different circumstances than the modern world offers up on a daily basis. Over the last few million years, much of our time was spent with fewer than 150 people, and what we knew about the world was based on examples from our daily lives. Mass media, statistical data, scientific findings—these things are not digested as easily as something you’ve seen with your own eyes. The old adage “I’ll believe it when I see it” is the availability heuristic at work.
    Politicians use this all the time. Whenever you hear a story that begins with “I met a mother of two in Michigan who lost her job because of a lack of funding for . . .” or something similar, the politician hopes the anecdote will sway your opinion. He or she is betting that the availability heuristic will influence you to assume that this one example is indicative of a much larger group of people.
    It’s simply easier to believe something if you are presented with examples than it is to accept something presented in numbers or abstract facts.
    School shootings were considered to be a dangerous new phenomenon after Columbine. That event fundamentally changed the way kids are treated in American schools, and hundreds of books, seminars, and films have been produced in an attempt to understand the sudden epidemic. The truth, however, was that there hadn’t been an increase in school shootings. According