July 30, 2013
You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney (Gotham, 2013)
(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)
Book description from the publisher:
The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart shares more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking, and gives readers a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains
David McRaney’s first book, You Are Not So Smart, evolved from his wildly popular blog of the same name. A mix of popular psychology and trivia, McRaney’s insights have struck a chord with thousands, and his blog—and now podcasts and videos—have become an Internet phenomenon.
Like You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality—except we’re not. But that’s okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of fifteen more ways we fool ourselves every day, including:
- The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater effect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us)
- Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don’t enjoy just to make the time or money already invested “worth it”)
- Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality)
McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and how to avoid falling for our own lies. This smart and highly entertaining book will be wowing readers for years to come.
Google Books preview:
See also: Author’s blog (You Are Not So Smart)
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- cognitive science,new books,psychology
July 28, 2013
Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility, ed. by Gregg D. Caruso (Lexington Books, 2013)
(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)
Book description from the publisher:
This book explores the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Given the profound importance that the concepts of free will and moral responsibility play in our lives—in understanding ourselves, society, and the law—it is important that we explore what is behind this new wave of skepticism. It is also important that we explore the potential consequences of skepticism for ourselves and society. This edited collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold skeptical positions of some sort, to display and explore the leading arguments for free will skepticism and to debate their implications. It includes original contributions by Susan Blackmore, Thomas W. Clark, Mark Hallett, John-Dylan Haynes and Michael Pauen, Ted Honderich, Neil Levy, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Daniela Goya Tocchetto, Shaun Nichols, Derk Pereboom, Susan Pockett, Maureen Sie, Saul Smilansky, Galen Strawson, Manuel Vargas, Benjamin Vilhauer, and Bruce Waller.
Google Books preview:
See also: Gregg Caruso’s website
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- new books
July 25, 2013
The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor (Material Texts) by Alberto Manguel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)
As far as one can tell, human beings are the only species for which the world seems made up of stories, Alberto Manguel writes. We read the book of the world in many guises: we may be travelers, advancing through its pages like pilgrims heading toward enlightenment. We may be recluses, withdrawing through our reading into our own ivory towers. Or we may devour our books like burrowing worms, not to benefit from the wisdom they contain but merely to stuff ourselves with countless words.
With consummate grace and extraordinary breadth, the best-selling author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night considers the chain of metaphors that have described readers and their relationships to the text-that-is-the-world over a span of four millennia. In figures as familiar and diverse as the book-addled Don Quixote and the pilgrim Dante who carries us through the depths of hell up to the brilliance of heaven, as well as Prince Hamlet paralyzed by his learning, and Emma Bovary who mistakes what she has read for the life she might one day lead, Manguel charts the ways in which literary characters and their interpretations reflect both shifting attitudes toward readers and reading, and certain recurrent notions on the role of the intellectual: “We are reading creatures. We ingest words, we are made of words. . . . It is through words that we identify our reality and by means of words that we ourselves are identified.”
See also: Author’s website
Comments (0)
- new books,reading
July 24, 2013
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- Uncategorized
