Think Like an Artist, don’t Act Like One – Review
Review / November 6, 2019

The science of art On the scientist/artist scale I am far on the side of science. However, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to learn from art. If we think of art as a way to represent an aspect of reality, then the chosen medium will alway impose limitations on this representation. The best art finds new ways to overcome these boundaries, taking in new ideas, thoughts and discoveries. It takes sufficiently elaborate mathematics to get perspectives and proportions right, which reflects in renaissance paintings, for example. Yet, modern art brought new forms of abstraction, as artists sought out better ways to depict their message. The creation of art needs a unique worldview, focused, analysing, and abstracting all at once. Unfortunately, this worldview also leads some artist to selling their own canned poop. It would be great to have the visualization and visual communication skills of a painter while keeping a socially acceptable professional behavior, so I was quite thrilled by the title of Think like an Artist, don’t Act like one. It was a little let down for me to find out that de Wilt’s book is just another collection of wisecracking, bon mots and aphorisms about artists…

Review – The Art of Thinking Clearly
Review / August 13, 2018

Review – The Art of Thinking Clearly: The title of The Art of Thinking Clearly may provoke some wrong assumptions about the book’s content. It is NOT a self-help about mental training or concentration techniques. Author Rolf Dobelli collected a lot of logical fallacies – expectations or assumptions people intuitively make that are illogical or unhelpful – with a brief description and some typical examples for each. Originally, these were published as a weekly newspaper column. I read the German version describing 52 of those fallacies with one short chapter dedicated to each one. There is a second part with 52 more chapters which I have not read yet. The English version of The Art of Thinking Clearly condenses the content of both volumes into 99 chapters. With that out of the way, here is the review. People are bad a thinking. This is not our fault, it’s evolutionary. Bears ate all those cavemen that took too long to reflect on a situation and consider possible actions. We are descendants of people that ran when everybody else ran, agreed to the group consensus, were quick to form an opinion and had a slight tendency to panic. Today, in a world…