Can ‘smart thinking’ books give you the edge?

Isn't the rule that the answer to any headline that asks a yes/no question is always no?

The article seems to be a "review in disguise" of the book "Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life" by Marcus du Sautoy. Due out Oct 19, 2021.

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Better-Shortcut-Math-Life/dp...

Anybody got the Cliffsnotes version ?

I'm skeptical of any book where the title practically screams "the profit motive for this work is making people think they'll magically be more successful and smarter just by reading it!" Success takes work. Sure, certain books can help you broaden your perspective, acquire knowledge, and maybe even get better at applying it, but these books and their titles tend to attract silver bullet seekers--those that want instantaneous gratification for minimal effort. At least Du Sautoy is a bit more modest in the text itself, assuming the article is accurate in its portrayal.

I think there are a lot of books that can help make you more successful, or better yet, help you have a better relationship with your body, mind, and spirit. Spoiler alert: none of them were written in the 21st century and none of them were written by business owners or social scientists. None of them have titles that read "Thinking Smarter" "The Road to Success" "10 Techniques for Climbing the Social Ladder"... etc. All of them lack the word "Secret" in the title. None of their blurbs have words like "greatest" "ultimate" "shortcut" "smart" or even "rationality"--a modern golden calf that human beings never possessed in full in the first place.

I'm not saying all the books in this category like the ones mentioned in the article don't ever have anything to teach us--they might have some nuggets, but for me alarm bells go off whenever the title, blurb, etc. try so desperately to convince prospective readers that they'll quite literally experience a shift in their thought patterns as a result of reading a single work, by a single author, from a single century.

In reality, thinking is practiced, just like anything else. If you want to think differently you need to dwell with different forms of thinking. It's not a simple transaction whereby I read X my brain morphs into Y. But speaking of modes of thought, transactional thought is pretty much all that remains so it's no wonder this genre is so successful...

The author of the Guardian piece is right to cite Horkheimer toward the end--nearly every day I find his work more prophetic and applicable to our contemporary situation:

> A deeper problem with the smart thinking genre as a whole is that it commits the sin identified half a century ago by the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer, in his Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967). “Reason is considered to come into its own,” he lamented, “when it rejects any status as an absolute (‘reason’ in the intensified sense of the word) and accepts itself simply as a tool.” Fifty-four years on, this idea – that reason is “simply a tool” – is so internalised as to appear the most basic of common sense. What is rationality? Why, says Pinker, simply “a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds”. The inevitable upshot of such an impoverished view of reason, Horkheimer thought, would be “the automatising of society and human behaviour”, and a “surrender to blind individual and national egoism”. Present readers may judge for themselves whether he turned out to be right.