A frightening diagnosis of a corrosive plague by an articulate expert in the field.
Something has gone seriously wrong with American society, and the root cause is digital technology.
As the director of a mental health clinic and a one-time heroin addict, Kardaras understands the nature of addiction. As he shows, social media and computer games can be as addictive and toxic as any chemical, leading to anxiety, depression, and despair. In his 2016 book, Glow Kids, the author examined the impact of the internet on children. Here, he takes a broader view, looking not just at teenagers and adults, but at society as a whole. Though he has seen many patients with borderline personality disorder, he believes that it is dramatically underreported. Many intense users of technology have fallen into a pattern of binary thinking, able to see only extremes and suffering from a lack of empathy. They are perpetually angry, fearful, and impulsive—all signs of BPD. Others have a deep sense of self-loathing and frustration, terrified that they will never meet the standards of the media influencers they follow. This has also led to political polarization, isolation, and a breakdown of long-standing social contracts. Added to the mental troubles are the physical effects of spending so much time glued to screens, particularly obesity and diabetes. Kardaras emphasizes that the effects of addiction are known by the tech companies, but they choose to do nothing because their profits are based on it. “I freely concede that we have achieved wondrous advancements in our technological abilities,” he writes. “But our species is deteriorating; we’re getting weaker, both physically and mentally.” As a therapist, he offers a plan for breaking the cycle of addiction, focused on finding a meaningful purpose and building real-life social connections. The difficulty with this is that it only works for those who want to recover, and the reality is that most tech addicts—like any other category of addict—won’t admit the problem.
A frightening diagnosis of a corrosive plague by an articulate expert in the field.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27849-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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