The Intelligence Trap

Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

David Robson, 2019 - 153.9 ROB Beaverton Library

p4 "Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?"

• the "correct" answer is yes ... but only if Anne and George are persons, not dogs or objects. My friend Jane had a dog named George, and her friend Anne looked at the dog. George is also a city in South Africa, and it is likely that a married Anne has looked at it.

p149 "In a lake, there is a patch of lilly pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

• the author expects 47 days as an answer, but ... 2^48 is 281,474,976,710,656 about 281 trillion, the ratio of the Caspian Sea to a postage stamp. Even if there were postage-stamp-sized lilly pads, the Caspian Sea is 1174 km long, and covering the last half (assuming growth from the center) means the north and south edges of the lillypad zone are growing 10527 meters per hour, about 3 meters per second, at the end of the 48th day (assuming they grow continuously, day and night). A better puzzle would use 16 days; about 66 thousand lilly pads, still unlikely, but not mathematically absurd.

p216 Iceland does outstandingly well at Euro 2016 soccer quarterfinals, beating teams like England. Author blames pro teams with "too much talent", big egos not collaborating or listening to each other. Graph on page 227 shows optimum at 66% top talent for football, graph on page 228 shows 50% top talent optimal for basketball.

p247 Challenger and Columbia disasters - both loose ET foam and faulty SRB seals had occured many times before, "but rather than see this as a warning, the staff had come to assume that it would always be safe."

p248 "outcome bias" ... near misses make organizations assume they are immune to failure.

p249 Air France 4590, Concorde from Paris to New York - runway debris thrown by tire into wing, fire and crash into hotel. 57 previous instances of burst tire, another ruptured wing, but luckily no explosion.