Overview: Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion is a book about approximate thinking and the enigma of persistent mental incompleteness.

Verdict: Why are ignorant people so confident? How do politicians utilize conflation to influence groups? Why do scientists fall for similar mistakes? How is complexity managed? Why does culture effortlessly shape what we can do?

This book argues: Because of approximations! Incompleteness pervades our interactions with the world. Its effects on individual and group behaviors can foster creativity or create invisible prisons. We navigate incompleteness with approximations and, too often, end up on the ‘dark side’.

This book resembles a tourist’s trip much more than a scientist’s expedition, and is for anyone interested in a broader understanding of an individual’s mental life and how identities, incompletenesses, and social contexts shape it.

As we examine approximations and think about their origins and the problems they can create, the reader will encounter glimpses from physics, biology, philosophy of science, management, marketing, politics, systems theory, fuzzy logic, geometry, design and creativity, culture, and neuro-science and more.

A recent study that I followed stated that Sensory phenomena (SP) are uncomfortable feelings, including bodily sensations, “just-right” perceptions and feelings of incompleteness, which have been shown to be predictors of symptom severity in individuals with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

These sensory phenomena have also been related to obsessive compulsive (OC) traits within the general population. This meta-analysis aimed to quantify a possible relationship between sensory phenomena (incompleteness and Not Just in Right Experiences; NJRE), with OC symptoms in clinical and non-clinical samples. Results: Effect sizes of incompleteness and NJRE were correlated to OCD symptoms. The effects sizes in the clinical and non-clinical groups did not differ significantly.

Discussion: Robust effect sizes of incompleteness and NJRE in relation to OC symptomatology confirm sensory phenomena as marker of OC symptoms in both groups. The findings suggest that sensory phenomena could be targeted as an intervention in those showing both clinical and sub-clinical levels of OC traits.

As I am sure we all know by now, those of us of a certain age, incompleteness syndrome is the troubling and irremediable sense that one’s actions or experiences are not just right and thus appears to underlie many of the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Can they be overridden? Can they be outed for good? Author Ahmad Hijazi has his thoughts and here in Fuzzy on the Dark Side, they may well be sometimes clinical in their reveal, but each and every one is impassioned and heartfelt and thus makes this book a must-read for all us incompletists out there in the big, wide world.

In short, Fuzzy on the Dark Side is a book about incompleteness, creativity, thinking, identities, and systems. Roughly - it is an approximation of the Approximate Thinking super idea.

About the Author - Ahmad Hijazi is a professor, corporate trainer, and consultant. After years of intellectual and occupational wandering, his current work and research focus on creating popular knowledge, impactful learning experiences, and applying his theoretical work on Cultural Resource Sets in the fields of innovation and marketing. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon.

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