Cognitive illusions

I just finished reading "Inevitable Illusions" (one of the books on the several that I got a while back) and I was going to write up the cognitive illusions (as the book is a bit waffly) but I just found a blog entry that does that job. The book also claims that several of these cognitive illusions come from people's lack of intuition concering conditional probabilities - so perhaps I will write up Bayes' rule to see if we can't sort everyone out on that front :-).

Before this book I read the "The Eudaemonic Pie" which was fascinating - I like these long term amateur yet serious project books. It's about a group of people who set out to beat roulette with a computer in a shoe (no small feat given that this was done around 1977). The experiments they did to gather the raw data, the subsequent analysis and modelling, the prototyping, the miniturisation, the problems in the field, etc......all great stuff!