Overview: 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!

Verdict: 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’.

Fuzzy on the Dark Side 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, incompleteness, 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.

For the first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers.

And with keywords attached such as: Obsessions, compulsions, obsessive-compulsive disorder, “just right” experiences, incompleteness, harm avoidance and more, I know that, at one time or another through our lives, we have all brought one or more of these keywords to the fore of our cluttered minds.

So author Ahmad Hijazi, himself a professor, corporate trainer, and consultant, has given us a most wondrous, thought-provoking prose on how life, society, and moreover ourselves can profoundly impact human behavior, relationships, and culture.

In what is a most glorious coverage of scientific fact together with bountiful theorems, the book clearly showcases how oversimplification and incomplete knowledge can lead to, amongst other things, the worst of the human traits, poor decision-making.

In closing, Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion is an engrossing book about incompleteness, creativity, thinking, identities, and systems. Simply put, it is an approximation of the Approximate Thinking super idea. Something that I think we can all agree we need a whole lot more of these days.

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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