
Rationality
What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
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Narrated by:
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Steven Pinker
About this listen
Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates’ "new favorite book of all time”) answers all the questions here.
Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and also appears to be losing its mind. 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 simply irrational - cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself. We actually 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 we’ve 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. These tools are not a standard part of our education, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now.
Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth.
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with Pinker’s customary insight and humor, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower.
This audiobook includes a PDF of charts and graphs.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2021 Steven Pinker (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Cognitive scientist Professor Steven Pinker has spent his life thinking about thinking, and now he wants us to join him. With the aid of his critical thinking toolkit, he hopes to help us make smarter choices, become more rational, gain a greater understanding of the confused world we live in—and maybe even become better citizens. In this fascinating series, produced in partnership with the Open University, he examines the different ways the human brain can be tripped up, from understanding probability to the difference between correlation and causation.
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Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author—has been exploring some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events on his podcast, Making Sense. For Harris, honest conversation, no matter how difficult or controversial, represents the only path to moral and intellectual progress. This audiobook includes talks with Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Snyder, Nick Bostrom, and Glen Loury, on topics that range from the nature of consciousness and free will, to politics and extremism, to living ethically.
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Audiobook review (just a podcast collection)
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Critic reviews
“An impassioned and zippy introduction to the tools of rational thought… Punchy, funny and invigorating.” (The Times, London)
“An engaging analysis of the highest of our faculties and perhaps (ironically) the least understood.” (The Wall Street Journal)
“If you’ve ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead.” (Jonathan Haidt, New York Times best-selling co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind)
"Erudite, lucid, funny and dense with fascinating material... A pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life.... It’s no small achievement to make formal logic, game theory, statistics and Bayesian reasoning delightful topics full of charm and relevance." (The Washington Post)
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Story
First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
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Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
- By Tristan on 04-10-16
By: Steven Pinker
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The Language Instinct
- How the Mind Creates Language
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 18 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association....
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Absolutely Amazing and Interesting
- By J. C. on 10-28-12
By: Steven Pinker
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Think with Pinker
- How to Be a Better Critical Thinker
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Steven Pinker, Various, Tim Harford, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Highlights
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Cognitive scientist Professor Steven Pinker has spent his life thinking about thinking, and now he wants us to join him. With the aid of his critical thinking toolkit, he hopes to help us make smarter choices, become more rational, gain a greater understanding of the confused world we live in—and maybe even become better citizens. In this fascinating series, produced in partnership with the Open University, he examines the different ways the human brain can be tripped up, from understanding probability to the difference between correlation and causation.
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not all pinkerton works are created equally
- By Dick Grayson on 06-01-24
By: Steven Pinker
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The Sense of Style
- The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Sense of Style, the best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
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A great book, done a great injustice by the audio
- By M. Kunze on 10-17-14
By: Steven Pinker
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Mindreader
- The New Science of Deciphering What People Really Think, What They Really Want, and Who They Really Are
- By: David J. Lieberman
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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What did your boss mean in that email? Is your mechanic stretching the truth? Whether you’re engaged in a casual conversation or a high-stakes negotiation, it’s critical to understand the subtext of a situation. But with so much interaction happening on screens—via email, texts, or video chat—we are losing the ability to interpret expressions and cues. Furthermore, since many are now savvy about the meaning of body language, it’s become even harder to discern someone’s true thoughts or intentions.
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Waste of a credit for common sense observations
- By Brendan on 08-30-22
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Know This
- Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
- By: John Brockman
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Dan John Miller
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it's technology, climate change, health research, or the latest revelations of neuroscience, physics, or psychology, science has, as Edge editor John Brockman says, "become a big story, if not the big story". In that spirit this new addition to Edge.org's fascinating series asks a powerful and provocative question: What do you consider the most interesting and important recent scientific news?
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Pete and Repeat and Re-repeat
- By Daniel L on 02-25-18
By: John Brockman
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Freedom of Mind
- Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs
- By: Steven Hassan
- Narrated by: Steven Hassan
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In the post-9/11 world, people are more susceptible than ever to charismatic figures who offer simple, black v. white, us v. them, good v. evil, formulaic solutions. The rise of the internet; increasingly sophisticated knowledge about how to influence and manipulate others; and the growing vulnerabilities of people across the planet-make for a dangerous, potentially devastating combination.
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Excellent content, poor delivery.
- By Luke W on 03-22-24
By: Steven Hassan
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The Scout Mindset
- Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
- By: Julia Galef
- Narrated by: Julia Galef
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe - and shoot down those we don't.
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An Excellent Book,
- By E&J on 04-16-21
By: Julia Galef
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Noise
- A Flaw in Human Judgment
- By: Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.
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Disappointing
- By Z28 on 05-31-21
By: Daniel Kahneman, and others
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Making Sense
- Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity
- By: Sam Harris
- Narrated by: Sam Harris, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author—has been exploring some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events on his podcast, Making Sense. For Harris, honest conversation, no matter how difficult or controversial, represents the only path to moral and intellectual progress. This audiobook includes talks with Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Snyder, Nick Bostrom, and Glen Loury, on topics that range from the nature of consciousness and free will, to politics and extremism, to living ethically.
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Audiobook review (just a podcast collection)
- By Amazon Customer on 12-21-20
By: Sam Harris
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The Selfish Gene
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 16 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.
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Better than print!
- By J. D. May on 07-31-12
By: Richard Dawkins
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The Model Thinker
- What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
- By: Scott E. Page
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja.
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It does not work on Audible
- By Hamilton Carvalho on 05-14-21
By: Scott E. Page
clear, useful, and important
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Last few chapters best
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Good plead to Rationality and human race
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Deeply Thought Provoking
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overall good and important
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Love reading Steven Pinker!
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Well constructed
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Great content but some sections require pdf
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It is difficult to be completely rational
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It's really odd. Chapters 1, 2, 10, and 11 are a wonderful essay about why rationality is essential, why humans are not hopelessly irrational, and how to push for a more rational world. Chapters 3 through 9, meanwhile, constitute his notes from his undergraduate course on formal systems of logic and similar subjects. Any of this could be interesting if you want to read a textbook, but if you do, audio is not the right format. It's very hard to follow his reasoning without being able to see it spelled out on the page. And I'm not convinced that all of it is relevant to the average person who wants to think rationally.
So for most people, I recommend skipping chapters 3 through 8. (Chapter 9, on correlation and causation, is the most enjoyable of the textbook-style chapters). You can find more accessible treatments of many of these issues elsewhere, such as in Nate Silver's The Signal and The Noise.
It's a shame many won't get to the excellent final two chapters of this book because of all the sludge in the middle. They really are wonderful.
Get the book, skip the middle.
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