Six books for Spring 2020
Stumbling on Happiness, Thinking: Fast and Slow, Uncharted, Everybody Lies, Breath by Breath, Gutenberg to Google
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"Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert ($14, $1.37, audio)
There are TED talks by Gilbert
Beware the replication problems
He uses the analogy of the brain between space and locations and the matter of time, moving forward and leaving the past behind
Because of immediate imagining and future dates, people often misperceive how their emotions will modify over time. Imagining a bad injury or loss is done with an image of the moment of its happening, not a while later.
The conjoined twins - can they possibly be happy?
We only remember highlights of past events. We don’t want to live thru the entire experience, just the parts that “matter” (Compare husband/wife memories)
Here is the card you picked! Here is the woman whose picture you liked! (Tricked!)
Information acquired AFTER an event alters the memory of the event
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"Thinking: Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman ($10, $2.69, audio)
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were a big help with my dissertation (1968). “Anchoring” numbers on scales and sales was part of their research.
So was inability of Israeli flight instructors to account for statistical regression. (Galton board)
In this book, Kahneman recounts research about financial advisors. They didn’t come off looking very good.
The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.
The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind. See "Incognito" by Eagleman.
I eventually realized that the transgressions of politicians are much more likely to be reported than the transgressions of lawyers and doctors. My intuitive impression could be due entirely to journalists’ choices of topics and to my reliance on the availability heuristic.
Mental availability explains lots. Recency matters. For more info, see https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2009/06/our-minds-and-reality.html
Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is driving erratically.
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"Uncharted" by Aidan and Michel ($7, $1.18, no audio)
Ngrams, the Ngram Viewer https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ngrams
The novel’s words in alphabetical order Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love by Karen Reimer
Aiden, Erez; Michel, Jean-Baptiste. Uncharted (p. 26). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“Beautiful” 29, intelligent 1
For every sneak that snuck in, there are many more flews that flied out.
Finding a book was a matter of knowing someone who knew someone who knew (or thought they knew) where the book was.
Big data can be misled by language and writing customs.
This sort of memory-by-association effect is a major problem: It’s impossible to account for and impossible to predict.
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, for example, what we now call snail mail used to arrive as often as fifteen times a day.
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"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (zero with Prime, $12, audio)
On an average day in the early part of the twenty-first century, human beings generate 2.5 million trillion bytes of data.
On a given day in some schools in rural India, more than 40 percent of teachers are absent.
Americans, for instance, search for “porn” more than they search for “weather.”
The more assertive the promise, the more likely he will break it. Generally, if someone tells you he will pay you back, he will not pay you back.
Increasing use of Google to search for help with any and all problems, personal or political or medical or whatever.
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"Breath by Breath" by Prof. Larry Rosenberg ($14, $1,99, audio)
Brooklyn yoga
Concentrating on the task at hand in Korea
Good language about using mindfulness throughout life
The cultivation of mindfulness is ultimately a matter of life and death, not in a scary way, but in the sense that we are always at risk, in every moment, for missing what is deepest and richest in our lives, the texture of the tapestry itself. We might say (every pun intended) that the richness lies right beneath our noses in any and every moment.
No two breaths are the same; no two moments are the same. Each one is our life. Each one is infinitely deep and complete in itself. The challenge here is to embody and live this awareness, to work with the automatic habits of mind that would turn us into automatons and betray our genius, to walk our own path, as Larry is continually encouraging the reader to do, to find our own way, breath by breath, to taste silence and discover liberation within each and any breath.
But seeing that the mind has wandered is practice.
Life is a precious gift, it’s all we have, and it is always happening in the present.
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"From Gutenberg to Google" by Tom Wheeler, former chair of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ($14.74, $11.33, audio)
Fear and change from printing, and 200 years of warfare and death due to the connection between Luther and printing
Reported to the Paris police for witchcraft in league with the devil
By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.
Telegraph and railroad - Lincoln and the telegraph, citrus fruit in more places, messages by lightning. See "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails"
The railroad, for instance, was “an unnatural impetus to society,” one journalist concluded, that would “destroy all the relations that exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulation, and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress.” The human brain will suffer irreparable damage if people travel at 25 miles an hour!
The canal companies, stagecoach and haulage firms, tavern owners, and others who were bypassed by the speeding railroad used everything from political muscle to vigilantism to derail the iron horse.
Bezos’s Amazon Kindle e-reader broke 550 years of precedent by separating the act of publishing from putting ink on paper.
A gigabyte a second is more than 300 million times faster than the telegraph and 30 billion times faster than horseback.