A fascinating perspective on what it means to be human, told with a clear voice and an expansive canvas.
Why the ability to imagine the future is a cornerstone of human survival and development.
How do we think ahead? How do we incorporate new information into our plans? Is our foresight trustworthy? Australian academics Suddendorf, Redshaw, and Bulley pull together a wide range of scientific disciplines to explain the nature of foresight, beginning with humanity’s prehistoric past. They examine how the capacity of early humans to look ahead—from knowing when food would become available to carrying a bag of stones to ward off predators—allowed the species to thrive. As civilization developed, foresight became even more important; it was critical to forecast tides, seasonal changes, and planting and harvesting times. As the authors show, complex foresight is a uniquely human quality. A few animals, such as dolphins and apes, have some capacity to look ahead, but it is limited, and their ability to communicate with others does not match that of humans. “To live in the present, our brain must continually forecast what’s coming next….Prediction is not only involved in perception and motor coordination but also manifests in our capacity to run simulations of tomorrow and beyond,” write the authors. Research suggests that most people develop reliable foresight at around the age of 4, but our emotions often interfere with our rationality. One reason is “optimism bias,” which causes us to overestimate the chances of good outcomes. In fact, our foresight is often wrong, and the authors entertainingly recount predictions that went hilariously awry. Foresight is largely a matter of extrapolation, and despite challenges, we can take precautions, such as insuring our house, putting aside money for an unexpected crisis or, on a larger scale, building things like the Global Seed Vault. Sprinkled throughout the book are well-placed moments of deadpan humor to leaven the authoritative research.
A fascinating perspective on what it means to be human, told with a clear voice and an expansive canvas.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781541675728
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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