These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book-until now. Instead, he explains that we 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 our best thinkers have 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. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and discovered the benchmarks for rationality itself. 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 an irrational species - cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. In the 21st century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding-and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. There’s even a book on how to write good English-for, sure enough, he is a master of that too.” - Richard Dawkins, Skeptical Inquirer MagazineĬan reading a book make you more rational? Can it help you understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? These are the goals of Rationality, Steven Pinker’s follow-up to Enlightenment Now.
Steven Pinker’s professional expertise encompasses linguistics, psychology, history, philosophy, evolutionary theory-the list goes on.
Grasp the fact that the field is different for each book, and you have the measure of this scholar. Yet each one simultaneously earns its place as a major professional contribution to its own field. What a consummate intellectual this man is! Every one of his books is a bracing river of fluent readability to delight the non-specialist. Which is another way of saying it’s bloody marvelous. “Just another run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road Pinker volume.
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