Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
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Steven Pinker. (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Penguin Publishing Group.

Steven Pinker. 2021. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Penguin Publishing Group.

Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Penguin Publishing Group, 2021.

Steven Pinker. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Penguin Publishing Group, 2021.

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Rationality

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“In our uncertain age, which can so often feel so dark and disturbing, Steven Pinker has distinguished himself as a voice of positivity.” – New York Times
Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates’s "new favorite book of all time”) answers all the questions here

Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing?
 
Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational—cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself.  We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we’ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our education, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book—until now.
  
Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth.
  
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with Pinker’s customary insight and humor, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 1, 2021
     

     Features editor and a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, Chafkin tells the story of The Contrarian, that is, billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who has significantly influenced the course of Silicon Valley. Columbia history/journalism professor Cobb and New Yorker editor Remnick illuminate The Matter of Black Lives in pieces collected from the magazine, starting with Rebecca West's account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind" and moving on to embrace works by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., among others (100,000-copy first printing). Having left behind her hometown in England's declining coal-mining region when her father declared There's Nothing for You Here, Brookings senior fellow Hill--now an American citizen and a former member of the National Security Council--draws on her extensive national intelligence work in Russia to warn that America's rocky situation today mirrors circumstances that led to Russia's socioeconomic decline (100,000-copy first printing). Rejecting the view that humans are irredeemably off-the-wall in their thinking (we have elucidated the laws of nature, for instance), two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Pinker argues in Rationality that we don't avail ourselves of logic in many everyday situations because we don't really need to. But we can learn how to think more logically, even as we recognize that some rational acts (he cites self-interest) can lead to damaging irrationality for society. Oxford professor Srinivasan's The Right to Sex talks about talking about sex in the #MeToo era, stating, for instance, that we need to deepen the prevailing concept of consent into something more nuanced (50,000-copy first printing). Award-winning journalist Streep's Brothers on Three revisit the players, families, and community that celebrated when the Arlee Warriors brought home the high school basketball state championship title to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana (75,000-copy first printing).

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 28, 2021
     In this revealing pop take on the mind and society, Harvard psychologist Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) investigates the nature of straight-thinking and the many ways it goes crooked. He lays out the basics of formal logic, probability, and statistics, and dissects common fallacies that violate them. The “argument from authority,” for example, takes pronouncements by “experts” as unquestionable gospel, while “availability bias” makes people falsely believe that nuclear accidents that garner huge news coverage are more dangerous than less-covered coal-fired power plants, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy—drawing a bulls-eye around a bullet hole after one shoots at a barn—is widespread as a way of passing off random data points as accurate predictions. Pinker skewers all manner of misguided thinking, myths, and “cockamamie conspiracy theories” across the ideological spectrum, from the Stop-the-Steal right to the “left-wing monoculture” that makes universities “laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense.” He manages to be scrupulously rigorous yet steadily accessible and entertaining whether probing the rationality of Andrew Yang’s presidential platform, Dilbert cartoons, or Yiddish proverbs. The result is both a celebration of humans’ ability to make things better with careful thinking and a penetrating rebuke to muddleheadedness.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 15, 2021
     Much-published psychologist Pinker looks at the not-so-common roots of common-sensical thinking. Rationality, writes the author, "emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies." In other words, it has a social dimension, and it invites good company in order to wrestle with big problems such as climate change. Unfortunately, "among our fiercest problems today is convincing people to accept the solutions when we do find them." That's because so many people are so--well, irrational, or at least encumbered by bad habits of thinking and presuppositions. Discussing beliefs in ghosts and haunted houses, the author wryly points out that 5% more people believe in the latter than in the former, which means "that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts." Rationality is not the same thing as logic, Pinker argues, though there are points in common. Along the way, he examines the differences between propensity and probability, the maddening habit of falling victim to confirmation bias (believing what we want to believe and never mind contrary evidence), the workings of the conjunction rule (by which we conflate suppositions about people and events based on little or no factuality), and our tendency to mistake coincidence for pattern. Pinker serves up plenty of mental exercises that are intended to help us overcome the tricks our minds play on us--e.g., Prisoner's Dilemma game-theoretic scenarios that help expose the reasons so many people are content to be "free riders" in using public goods; or stupid conspiracy theories advanced by people who believe they're being suppressed, which, as Pinker notes, is "not the strategy you see from dissidents in undeniably repressive regimes like North Korea or Saudi Arabia." The author can be heady and geeky, but seldom to the point that his discussions shade off into inaccessibility. A reader-friendly primer in better thinking through the cultivation of that rarest of rarities: a sound argument.

     COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 10, 2021
     

     In contemporary society, political rhetoric has divided thinking about historic and current events. This has caused many, including some in the scholarly community, to call into question the ability of human beings to think and behave rationally. In his latest book, Pinker (Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard Univ.; Enlightenment Now), a prominent scholar of the human mind and communication, has dissected the scientific process humans use to formulate their beliefs and the rationale they use to sustain these beliefs. Although scientific and statistical processes saturate his description, his simple, humorous, and easy-to-relate-to writing style--which he has used effectively in many previous works--will make it surprisingly simple to understand his reasoning, and most readers will come away feeling they have just had a sound educational experience. Pinker defines rationality as the use of knowledge to attain a goal, and, among other things, argues that human beings need to better use scientific tools, including the gathering of scientific evidence, before stating and holding to a belief, particularly those that are life altering, such as the effectiveness of vaccine for COVID-19. VERDICT A thought-provoking work of popular psychology that is recommended for academic libraries and public libraries that serve larger populations.--Steve Dixon, State Univ. of New York, Delhi

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“In our uncertain age, which can so often feel so dark and disturbing, Steven Pinker has distinguished himself as a voice of positivity.” – New York Times
Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates’s "new favorite book of all time”) answers all the questions here

Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing?
 
Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational—cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our...

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What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

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