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RATIONALITY

Name: RATIONALITY
Author: Steven Pinker
ISBN: 978-0-525-56199-6

WHAT IT IS, WHY IT SEEMS SCARCE, WHY IT MATTERS

by Steven Pinker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 2021

A reader-friendly primer in better thinking through the cultivation of that rarest of rarities: a sound argument.

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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.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-525-56199-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS . . .
by Steven Pinker

- BOOK REVIEW
ENLIGHTENMENT NOW
by Steven Pinker

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SENSE OF STYLE
by Steven Pinker

- SEEN & HEARD
Steven Pinker Resigns From UATX Advisory Board

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.