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I agree with many things in this book. However, I disagree with some of Pinker's basic principles and a few of his specific statements. For example, Pinker follows Hume and other moderns in arguing that reason/rationality applies to means, not ends. Ends are, according to Hume and Pinker, postulated by our emotions, our desires, our feelings. If so, then Hitler was rational to the extent that his war machine was rationally designed to achieve his end of world conquest and tyranny. He was irratio...
Steven Pinker is a firebrand.And that in itself is a kind of a mystery to me. Only because I find his basic arguments to be (for lack of a better word) reasonable. His message is (essentially):The current state of affairs is obviously concerning.But if you look at the human condition over the long term, a lot of things are improving.According to Pinker.Science, technology, rule of law and liberal democracy have liberated billions of humans from poverty, miserable servitude, disease and political...
The message of this book is important and timely and I am wholly in agreement with its arguments and analyses. However, I did find it a bit of a slog.Pinker argues clearly and passionately that rationality and reason are vital and that their current abandonment by a worrying number of people is dangerous. He looks at the role of rationality and the essential part it plays in maintaining a civilised society and also attempts to analyse why some people reject it in favour of irrationality, conspir...
This book can be tough going. Pinker condenses into just a few hundred pages what would surely be a full 3-credit Logic course at a university. It gets a little hard to follow. But there's a payoff. I think of myself as very rational. But I fell for the fallacious answer to several of the questions that Pinker poses. Here's an example. On the game show Let's Make a Deal, let's say you chose Door #1. If the host reveals that the big prize is NOT behind Door #3, should you change your choice to Do...
More Faerie Tales From Mary Poppins“What is a man,If his chief good and market of his timeBe but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.Sure he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave us notThat capability and godlike reasonTo fust in us unus’d.—Hamlet”This epigraph from Shakespeare, which Pinker uses to preface his latest book, summarises his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue he addresses. For Pinker, Shakespeare seems to be saying ‘if you got it flaunt it.’ ‘...
Brilliant! Very well structured, which is not easy for a book on rationality. Very well researched, great resources cited. Very highly recommended!
This book starts out with a review and discussion of logic, probability, and randomness. Proceeding from that foundation it explores ways in which people can be predictably led astray by following their intuition. The book then continues with a discussion of game theory and behavioral economics. Toward the end the book addresses the issues promised by the book’s subtitle; why rationality seems so scarce and why it’s important.The book suggests that one reason humans are so poor at estimating exp...
Honestly, some of this was a little over my head, ha. But I liked a lot of what he had to say, and I kept saving quotable bits. "Three quarters of Americans believe in at least one phenomenon that defies the laws of science, including psychic healing (55 percent), extrasensory perception (41 percent), haunted houses (37 percent), and ghosts (32 percent)— which also means that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts.""And a special place in Journalist Hell is r...
I'd like to think I'm a rational being, but I also know that I'm prone to sporadic fits of irrationality, just like everyone else out there. So I when I came across this book, I knew I had to read it. I was hoping it would give me insight into myself, and also help me understand why it seems like a large portion of our population have lately given in to the irrational devils of our nature.And this book did offer insight. In particular, the first and second to last chapters were riveting, approac...
There's nothing new here for anyone who has a basic knowledge of logic, statistics, game theory and behavioral economics. Still, it's a good recap of basic concepts, and Mr. Pinker does a good job of describing current academic thinking about our departures from rationality and why things that seem like departures may really only be issues of context and point of view that are not necessarily irrational at all. I generally agree with everything that is in this book, so why did I come away from i...
Wouldn’t have read it if i hadn’t received it for free, and it wasn’t pre publication.If i disagree with this book its because of its aesthetic, or lack thereof. Ugly book.It also violates my taboo against reality mathematics, and in particular morality mathematics.I does provide a workout though, and throws into focus the failing of my mind. I failed the nearly all of the logic problems.
What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more… https://youtu.be/N7RYRs9nuXI
Rationality spends most of the book length covering elementary concepts from a collection of subjects. Even when it comes to pulling them together for something original in conclusions, the book fails equally abjectly.For some strange reasons, the author recounts the topics well covered in hundreds of books from the fields of probability theory, statistics, game theory, logic, behavioral sciences, and the likes. These discussions are staggeringly unoriginal in their conclusions and the details -...
I have read all of Steven Pinker's books, and enjoyed this one as well. Before reading this one, though, I thought that it might be somewhat boring. After all, how interesting could this subject be?Boy, was I wrong! Pinker has written a truly engaging book. Every page is fascinating. In addition, this is the most humorous book that Pinker has written. For example, this quote from comedian George Carlin: “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast major...
Are all maps equally useful?Suppose that you are lost in the Himalayas but only have a map of the Pyrenees. Is this map helpful? Sure, it is viable as fuel for fire but not as a map to navigate the territory. Maps correspond to the territory as our beliefs correspond to reality. Are all beliefs about reality equally accurate? Are all beliefs about how to achieve a goal equally conducive?You cannot make an accurate map of a city by sitting at home with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper
3.5 stars I guess. I really loved Pinker’s earlier books about linguistics and psychology. There’s certainly some good stuff in this book, but I don’t think he covered the topic all that well. There were reminders of his good sense of humor and his good writing, but not so much. I’m happy that he uses interesting words, but he may have gone a little overboard in using obscure terminology.
Rationality can be defined as “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” You don’t get credit for rationality if you attain a goal simply by chance; rather, your beliefs must be true, rather than false, and justified, rather than random. Whether the goal is theoretical (proving the truth of an idea) or practical (achieving some tangible outcome), to be rational simply means using knowledge (justified true belief) to attain the stated goal. Reason also has the unique characteristic of being
Down the rabbit hole I went again. We live in a world where we highly prioritize being rational. But why? And how can we define someone as rational? What is Irrational? By doing this aren't we dividing the world in black and white instead of seeing it as grey?"We should not be surprised that what people take away from science education is a syncretic mishmash, where gravity and electromagnetism coexist with psi, qi, karma, and crystal healing."There's been a huge rise in behavioral economics in
Sweet irony! A call to rationality from a white old male who is dominated by his irrational fears: Muslims, Covid, anything that might threaten his dominant status. And, like the Christian preachers he despises, whomever doesn't care about his important issues, they are irrational, a white way to say Haram.
Objective of the book: 5Certain arguments: 3So, to sum up:-Trump is a stupid asshole- We are a rational species that can trigger stupidity at whole other levelsThis part is ok. I mean, this book explains some of the reasons why we can be really, really stupid. There are not just fallacies in logic (ad hominem, ad verecundiam, conjunction, genetic, sunk-cost, straw man and a hundred more), but there are also psychological biases (confirmation, cognitive, and many, many more) that really fuck up o...