
Fluke
Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
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Narrated by:
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Brian Klaas
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By:
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Brian Klaas
About this listen
This “captivating illustration of the follies of trying to model and forecast the unpredictable world” (Financial Times) is both “empowering” (The New Statesman, UK) and “compelling” (New Scientist) as it challenges our most fundamental assumptions—by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas.
If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself?
In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas takes a deep-dive into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.
Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?
Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.
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starts well but later deviates from the subject
- By Mats Bengtsson on 06-15-22
By: Todd Rose
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No Democracy Lasts Forever
- How the Constitution Threatens the United States
- By: Erwin Chemerinsky
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided. Deeply troubled by the Constitution's inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy.
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Leftist, but he makes sense to me
- By Mike Liveright on 11-29-24
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How Minds Change
- The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
- By: David McRaney
- Narrated by: David McRaney
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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What made a prominent conspiracy-theorist YouTuber finally see that 9/11 was not a hoax? Can you finally have a productive conversation about politics with your uncle at the next family gathering? How does an ordinary person find the courage to leave a cult? Can widespread social change only take place when a generation dies out?
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Fascinating, nuanced, well-written, but…
- By Jason J. Gay on 08-13-22
By: David McRaney
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Fluke
- Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
- By: Christopher Moore
- Narrated by: Bill Irwin
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals - until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite Me.
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Best way to ruin a good book.
- By colleen on 02-18-08
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Complexity
- The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- By: M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
- By Dennis E. Alwine on 12-26-20
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The Art of Statistics
- How to Learn from Data
- By: David Spiegelhalter
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Statistics are everywhere, as integral to science as they are to business, and in the popular media hundreds of times a day. In this age of big data, a basic grasp of statistical literacy is more important than ever if we want to separate the fact from the fiction, the ostentatious embellishments from the raw evidence - and even more so if we hope to participate in the future, rather than being simple bystanders.
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very good statistics overview
- By Tom on 11-29-19
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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The Unaccountability Machine
- Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind
- By: Dan Davies
- Narrated by: Peter Dickson
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.
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Illuminating.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-12-25
By: Dan Davies
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Bernoulli's Fallacy
- Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science
- By: Aubrey Clayton
- Narrated by: Tim H. Dixon
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it.
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Rigorously Bayesian
- By Anonymous User on 01-25-22
By: Aubrey Clayton
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The Fyodor Dostoyevsky Complete Collection
- The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; Notes from the Underground; The Demons; Novellas; Complete Short Stories; Essays; and Letters
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Narrated by: David Rintoul, Jonathan Keeble, Malk Williams, and others
- Length: 266 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Fyodor Dostoyevky's greatest works: 15 novels and novellas, 18 short stories, a short study of Dostoyevsky by Virginia Woolf, and two books of non-fiction - his Letters and European travel journal.
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A Crucial Human Journey
- By O. on 04-07-24
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Outraged
- Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
- By: Kurt Gray
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have radically different moral foundations. In Outraged, Kurt Gray showcases the latest science to demonstrate that we all have the same moral mind—that everyone’s moral judgments stem from feeling threatened or vulnerable to harm, and provides a captivating new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the “other side,” ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?
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Great book. Horrible narrator.
- By Sara Stall-Ryan on 02-22-25
By: Kurt Gray
Another outstanding book from Klaas!
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Glad I read it but not my highest recommendation.
Not bad —but I was hoping for mote
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Very nice and interesting!
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This book should be listed as fiction
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The "What If"and the "What Is" book.
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Only thing he misses is the grace we receive when we acknowledge our lack of control. And surrender to the larger adventure of an infinite game of choosing to be useful. Allowing spirit to make art with our life.
The surprise of combining lack of control with a new level of freedom adventure and joy
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Great read
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Chance, Causality and Fluke
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Great narration & Continually interesting content
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Uñbèlievaɓle facts about things I thought I knew a lot about, which make history infinitely more facinating
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