Political Irrationality
Discover essential reads on political irrationality. Explore Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, Lakoff's The Political Mind, and more on how psychology shapes politics.
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The Political Mind
by George Lakoff
A New York Times best-selling author explains how the physical nature of the brain affects people's political decisions, suggesting that changing one's mind is just as much a physical process as it is a psychological function. By the author of Don't Think of an Elephant! 60,000 first printing.
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The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the impossible. For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications. The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory.The Black Swan is a landmark book, itself a black swan.
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The Assault on Reason
by Al Gore
Now with a New Preface and Conclusion: “Post-Truth: On Donald Trump and the 2016 Election” “This book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who . . . has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Gore’s faith in human nature is braver and sharper than (the cynics). . . . This book isn’t about him; it’s about the republic whose freedoms depend on increasing reasoned debate and reducing intimidating noise.” —The Boston Globe What has happened to our country and how can we fix it? We are in the midst of a deepening crisis for our democracy. After the strangest election cycle in modern American history it is important that we address the grave threats to our way of life that were glaringly revealed in this campaign. In The Assault on Reason, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore examines how faith in the power of reason—the idea that citizens can govern themselves through rational debate—is in peril. Our democracy depends on a well-informed citizenry and a two-way conversation about ideas, but our public sphere has been degraded by fake news and the politics of fear, partisanship, and blind faith. Now updated to investigate the rise of Trump and post-truth politics, The Assault on Reason is a call to rebuild the vitality of American democracy by restoring the nation’s information ecosystem so that we can start making good decisions again.
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The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
by Greg Palast
An investigative journalist provides an expose of intrigue, financial misdeeds, and other machinations at the highest level of American politics.
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Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: Third Edition ― The Classic Economics Book on Creative Destruction (Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 21)
by Schumpeter, Joseph A.
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