This is the fourth and final part in a mini-sequence presenting Keith E. Stanovich's excellent book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought.

If you want to give people a single book to introduce people to the themes and ideas discussed on Less Wrong, What Intelligence Tests Miss is probably the best currenty existing book for doing so. It does have a somewhat different view on the study of bias than we on LW: while Eliezer concentrated on the idea of the map and the territory and aspiring to the ideal of a perfect decision-maker, Stanovich's perspective is more akin to bias as a thing that prevents people from taking full advantage of their intelligence. Regardless, for someone less easily persuaded by LW's somewhat abstract ideals, reading Stanovich's concrete examples first and then proceeding to the Sequences is likely to make the content presented in the sequences much more interesting. Even some of our terminology such as "carving reality at the joints" and the instrumental/epistemic rationality distinction will be more familiar to somebody who was first read What Intelligence Tests Miss.

Below is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book.

Inside George W. Bush's Mind: Hints at What IQ Tests Miss is a brief introductory chapter. It starts with the example of president George W. Bush, mentioning that the president's opponents frequently argued against his intelligence, and even his supporters implicitly conceded the point by arguing that even though he didn't have "school smarts" he did have "street smarts". Both groups were purportedly surprised when it was revealed that the president's IQ was around 120, roughly the same as his 2004 presidential candidate opponent John Kerry. Stanovich then goes on to say that this should not be surprising, for IQ tests do not tap into the tendency to actually think in an analytical manner, and that IQ had been overvalued as a concept. For instance, university admissions frequently depend on tests such as the SAT, which are pretty much pure IQ tests. The chapter ends by a disclaimer that the book is not an attempt to say that IQ tests measure nothing important, or that there would be many kinds of intelligence. IQ does measure something real and important, but that doesn't change the fact that people overvalue it and are ge...

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