Free Bet Calculator Calculate your bet return ⇒ William Hill

A comprehensive list of books that might be of interest to people that want to read something that would improve their thinking or some friends?
I have not read many of these, thus I can not personally vouch for all of them or recommend one over the other.
I'm not affiliated with Goodreads, but linked to them since I wanted to include the ratings and they have links to several different sources including libraries if you want to borrow or acquire any one of these, and often some quality reviews.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
by Michael Shermer 3.93 · Rating details · 6,985 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9754534-the-believing-brain
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.
Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life
by Richard Paul, Linda Elder
3.93 · Rating details · 1,082 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17296839-critical-thinking
Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover.
Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth Ñ and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life.
The Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking by Linda Elder,Richard Paul
3.89 · Rating details · 163 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19227921-the-thinker-s-guide-to-analytic-thinking
This guide focuses on the intellectual skills that enable one to analyze anything one might think about - questions, problems, disciplines, subjects, etc. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis.
It is based on the assumption that all reasoning can be taken apart and analyzed for quality.
This guide introduces the elements of reasoning as implicit in all reasoning. It begins with this idea - that whenever we think, we think for a purpose, within a point of view, based on assumptions, leading to implications and consequences. We use data, facts and experiences (information), to make inferences and judgments,based on concepts and theories to answer a question or solve a problem. Thus the elements of thought are: purpose, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications and point of view. In this guide, authors Linda Elder and Richard Paul explain, exemplify and contextualize these elements or structures of thought, showing the importance of analyzing reasoning in every part of human life. This guide can be used as a supplement to any text or course at the college level; and it may be used for improving thinking in personal and professional life.
The Thinker's Guide to Intellectual Standards by Linda Elder, Richard Paul
4.19 · Rating details · 16 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19017637-the-thinker-s-guide-to-intellectual-standards
Humans routinely assess thinking – their own thinking, and that of others, and yet they don’t necessarily use standards for thought that are reasonable, rational, sound.
To think well, people need to routinely meet intellectual standards, standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic, fairness, significance, and so forth.
In this guide authors Elder and Paul offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language. They look at the opposites of these standards. They argue for their contextualization within subjects and disciplines. And, they call attention to the forces that undermine their skilled use in thinking well. At present intellectual standards tend to be either taught implicitly, or ignored in instruction. Yet because they are essential to high quality reasoning in every part of human life, they should be explicitly taught and explicitly understood.
The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide by Gleb Tsipursky (Goodreads Author) 4.24 · Rating details · 63 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36800752-the-truth-seeker-s-handbook
How do you know whether something is true? How do you convince others to believe the facts?
Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors - predictable mistakes that cause us to believe comfortable lies over inconvenient truths. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole.
Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws.
This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality.
With examples from daily life and an engaging style, the book will provide you with the skills to avoid thinking errors and help others to do so, preventing disasters and facilitating success for yourself, those you care about, and our society.
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
by Robert A. Burton 3.90 · Rating details · 2,165 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2740964-on-being-certain
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know.
He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge.
In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact.
Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason.
But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know.
Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
by Christopher Chabris,Daniel Simons 3.91 · Rating details · 13,537 ratings · 704 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7783191-the-invisible-gorilla
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking
by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley
3.94 · Rating details · 1,290 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394398.Asking_the_Right_Questions
The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.
On Truth by Simon Blackburn 3.60 · Rating details · 62 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722220-on-truth
Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eternal truth, or is truth simply a matter of perspective, of linguistic or cultural vantage point?
In this concise book Simon Blackburn provides an accessible explanation of what truth is and how we might think about it.
The first half of the book details several main approaches to how we should think about, and decide, what is true.
These are philosophical theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, deflationism, and others.
He then examines how those approaches relate to truth in several contentious domains: art, ethics, reasoning, religion, and the interpretation of texts.
Blackburn's overall message is that truth is often best thought of not as a product or an end point that is 'finally' achieved, but--as the American pragmatist thinkers thought of it--as an ongoing process of inquiry. The result is an accessible and tour through some of the deepest and thorniest questions philosophy has ever tackled
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
4.16 · Rating details · 317,352 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZNhf1bAIxd&rank=1
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John A. Bargh (Goodreads Author)
3.97 · Rating details · 788 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it
Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times—giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.
For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.
Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction.
With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more.
Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better.
Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38315.Fooled_by_Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 4.07 · Rating details · 49,010 ratings
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.
Philosophy books
Epistemology by Richard Feldman 3.84 · Rating details · 182 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387295.Epistemology
Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. KEY TOPICS: Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism.
Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology by Michael J. Williams
3.79 · Rating details · 86 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477904.Problems_of_Knowledge
"What is epistemology or 'the theory of knowledge'? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge 'philosophical'? And why do some philosophers argue that epistemology - perhaps even philosophy itself - is dead?" "
In this introduction, Michael Williams answers these questions, showing how epistemological theorizing is sensitive to a range of questions about the nature, limits, methods, and value of knowing.
He pays special attention to the challenge of philosophical scepticism: does our 'knowledge' rest on brute assumptions? Does the rational outlook undermine itself?"
Williams explains and criticizes all the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on human knowledge, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory, and 'naturalistic' theories. As an alternative to all of them, he defends his distinctive contextualist approach.
As well as providing an accessible introduction for any reader approaching the subject for the first time, this book incorporates Williams's own ideas which will be of interest to all philosophers concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Philosophy: The Basics
by Nigel Warburton 3.84 · Rating details · 1,928 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31854.Philosophy
Now in its fourth edition, Nigel Warburton's best-selling book gently eases the reader into the world of philosophy. Each chapter considers a key area of philosophy, explaining and exploring the basic ideas and themes.
What is philosophy? Can you prove God exists? Is there an afterlife? How do we know right from wrong? Should you ever break the law? Is the world really the way you think it is? How should we define Freedom of Speech? Do you know how science works? Is your mind different from your body? Can you define art? For the fourth edition, Warburton has added new sections to several chapters, revised others and brought the further reading sections up to date. If you've ever asked what is philosophy, or whether the world is really the way you think it is, then this is the book for you.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14829260-the-oxford-handbook-of-thinking-and-reasoning
by Keith J. Holyoak (Editor), Robert G. Morrison (Editor)
4.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning.
Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading.
Chapters include introductions to foundational issues and methods of study in the field, as well as treatment of specific types of thinking and reasoning and their application in a broad range of fields including business, education, law, medicine, music, and science.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics.
Feminist Epistemologies
(Thinking Gender) by Linda Martín Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter 4.14 · Rating details · 43 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477960.Feminist_Epistemologies
Noticed this review by an evangelical:
"I have found this an immensely suggestive book, collecting as it does essays from both prominent and rising figures in feminist philosophy of knowledge--albeit from about two decades ago. I am struck by how little impact feminist thought, even of this high and generally temperate quality, has had on evangelical theology, to the shame of my guild."
-John
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely 3.94 · Rating details · 13,620 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426114-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty
The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves.
Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty?
Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat.
From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty.
Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis.
But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not.
For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.
But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (Goodreads Author)
4.27 · Rating details · 59,893 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
What Is the Name of This Book?
by Raymond M. Smullyan
4.24 · Rating details · 757 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_
If you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan — a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author — presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into Gödel’s undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle
The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
by Eugenia Cheng 3.55 · Rating details · 740 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38400400-the-art-of-logic-in-an-illogical-world
How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world
In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can't be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic--for example, emotion--is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.
How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age
by Theodore Schick Jr. Lewis Vaughn, Martin Gardner (Foreword)
4.00 · Rating details · 530 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41756.How_to_Think_about_Weird_Things
This text serves well as a supplemental text in:

critical thinking
logic
introduction to philosophy
philosophy of science
epistemology
metaphysics
introduction to psychology
anomalistic psychology
perception and cognition

as well as any introductory science course.
It has been used in all of the courses mentioned above as well as introductory biology, introductory physics, and introductory chemistry courses. It could also serve as a main text for courses in evaluation of the paranormal, philosophical implications of the paranormal, occult beliefs, and pseudoscience.
Popular Statistics
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
by Charles Wheelan 3.94 · Rating details · 10,367 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17986418-naked-statistics
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.
And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't by Nate Silver
3.98 · Rating details · 43,804 ratings · 3,049 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise
One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012
New York Times Bestseller
"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." -New York Times Book Review
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." -Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism." -New York Review of Books
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.
Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way: Understanding Statistics and Probability with Star Wars, Lego, and Rubber Ducks
by Will Kurt 4.20 · Rating details · 126 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392893-bayesian-statistics-the-fun-way
Fun guide to learning Bayesian statistics and probability through unusual and illustrative examples.
Probability and statistics are increasingly important in a huge range of professions. But many people use data in ways they don't even understand, meaning they aren't getting the most from it. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way will change that.
This book will give you a complete understanding of Bayesian statistics through simple explanations and un-boring examples. Find out the probability of UFOs landing in your garden, how likely Han Solo is to survive a flight through an asteroid shower, how to win an argument about conspiracy theories, and whether a burglary really was a burglary, to name a few examples.
By using these off-the-beaten-track examples, the author actually makes learning statistics fun. And you'll learn real skills, like how to:

How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief
Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for
Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions
Calculate distributions to see the range of your data
Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from them

Brief Description of The Elite Conspiracy - The Bilderberg's, Council of Foreign Relations , and Trilateral Commission. PART 2

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Let’s start with the smoke and mirrors furnished by the CFR in several of their Annual Reports. Then we will provide the other-side-of-the-coin, as observed by quite a number of independent researchers, and writers.
The CFR’s Annual Report for July 1, 1993-June 30, 1994, page 4, states:

"The Council on Foreign Relations is a nonprofit, and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of US foreign policy, and international affairs through the exchange of ideas. The Council was founded in 1921 shortly after the end of World War I. Several of the American participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private American citizens to become familiar with the increasing international responsibilities, and obligations of the United States.

This decision led to the creation of an organization dedicated to the continuous study of US foreign policy for the benefit of both its members, and a wider audience of interested Americans."
Now, the other side of the coin.
The New World Order, by Pat Robertson, 1991, page 66-67, states:

"This august body of ‘wise men’ has effectively dominated the making of foreign policy by the United States government since before World War II. The CFR has included virtually every key national security, and foreign policy adviser of this nation for the past seventy years." "In government policy, the most visible expression of the Establishment is the Council on Foreign Relations, and its publication, Foreign Affairs. Out of some twenty-nine hundred members, at least five hundred are very powerful, another five hundred are from centers of influence, and the rest are influential in academia, the media, business, and finance, the military, or government. A few are token conservatives." Page 96 "According to a man who had been a member for fifteen years, Rear Admiral Chester Ward, former judge advocate general of the navy from 1956 to 1960. ‘This purpose of promoting disarmament, and submergence of US sovereignty, and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government is the only objective revealed to about 95 percent of 1,551 members [in 1975]. There are two other ulterior purposes the CFR influence is being used to promote; but it is improbable that they are known to more than 75 members, or that these purposes ever have even been identified in writing.’ The goals of the Establishment are somewhat strange, and we will discuss them in detail.

At the central core is a belief in the superiority of their own skill to form a world system in which enlightened monopolistic capitalism can bring all of the diverse currencies, banking systems, credit, manufacturing, and raw materials into one government-supervised whole, policed of course by their own world army." (Could this be the army of the United Nations?) Page 97
CFR membership is made up of present, and past

Presidents Ambassadors Secretaries of State Wall Street investors international bankers foundation executives Think Tank executives lobbyist lawyers NATO, and Pentagon military leaders wealthy industrialist media owners, and executives university presidents, and key professors select Senators, and Congressmen Supreme Court Justices Federal Judges wealthy entrepreneurs

They hold regular secret meetings including members, and very select guests. Occasionally they will hold a public meeting, and invite the open press (including C-SPAN), in order to give the impression that they are a harmless group engaged only in social activities.
A number of people, when hearing about the CFR ask,

"If you say that the CFR is such a secret organization, why is it that we can get a copy of their annual report, which contains a list of their members? Why should I believe you when you say that they are a secret organization?"

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, states that the definition of attribute is,

"To ascribe by way of cause, inherent quality, interpretation, authorship, or classification..."

The literal translation is,

"You had better not tell the outsiders what we do, or say".

The answer then comes from their own document, the Council on Foreign Relation’s 1992 Annual Report, where they emphatically state, in 20 different places, and in varying terms, that members better not tell:

"At all meetings, the Council’s rule of non-attribution applies. This assures participants that they may speak openly without others later attributing their statements to them in public media or forums, or knowingly transmitting them to persons who will." Page 21 "Like the Council, the Committees encourage candid discourse by holding their meetings on a not-for-attribution basis". Page 122 Article II of the by-laws states: "It is an express condition of membership in the Council, to which condition every member accedes by virtue of his or her membership, that members will observe such rules, and regulations as may be prescribed from time to time by the Board of Directors concerning the conduct of Council meetings or the attribution of statements made therein, and that any disclosure, public, or other action by a member in contravention thereof may be regarded by the Board of Directors in its sole discretion as grounds for termination or suspension of membership pursuant to Article I of the by-laws." Page 169 "Full freedom of expression is encouraged at Council meetings. Participants are assured that they may speak openly, as it is the tradition of the Council that others will not attribute or characterize their statements in public media or forums or knowingly transmit them to persons who will. All participants are expected to honor that commitment." Page 174 "It would not be in compliance with the reformulated Rule, however, for any meeting participant: to publish a speaker’s statement in attributed form in a newspaper; to repeat it on television or radio, or on a speaker’s platform, or in a classroom; or to go beyond a memo of limited circulation, by distributing the attributed statement in a company or government agency newspaper. The language of the Rule also goes out of its way to make it clear that a meeting participant is forbidden knowingly to transmit the attributed statement to a newspaper reporter or other such person who is likely to publish it in a public medium.

The essence of the Rule as reformulated is simple enough: participants in Council meetings should not pass along an attributed statement in circumstances where there is substantial risk that it will promptly be widely circulated or published." Page 175 ... "In order to encourage to the fullest a free, frank, and open exchange of ideas in Council meetings, the Board of Directors has prescribed, in addition to the Non-Attribution Rule, the following guidelines. All participants in Council meetings are expected to be familiar with, and adhere to these Guidelines. ..." "Members bringing guests should complete a "guest notice card", and acquaint their guests with the Council’s Non-Attribution Rule governing what is said at meetings." Page 176 "As a condition of use, the officers of the Council shall require each user of Council records to execute a prior written commitment that he will not directly or indirectly attribute to any living person any assertion of fact or opinion based upon any Council record without first obtaining from such person his written consent thereto."
In "A letter from the Chairman" in the 1994 Annual Report for the CFR, Peter G. Peterson states on page 7, that:

"... Members had occasion to meet in intensive off-the-record sessions with Secretary of State [Warren] Christopher, National Security Advisor [Anthony] Lake, Secretary [of State emeritus, George Pratt] Shultz, Ambassador [Mickey] Kantor, Under Secretary of the Treasury [Lawrence H.] Summers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other ranking officials.

Next on our agenda are plans for reaching out to congressional leaders as well, an opportunity we will fashion as one component of an enhanced Washington Program."
The CFR’s 1999 Annual Report, page 5, states their three goals:

Add value by improving understanding of world affairs and by providing new ideas for US foreign policy. Transform the Council into a truly national organization to benefit from the expertise and experience of leaders nationwide. Find and nurture the next generation of foreign policy leaders and thinkers.

These are "THEIR" words, not mine. I am simply reporting these facts to you.
If this is not a secret organization, then why would they be so emphatic, and state in 20 different ways that non-attribution (or you better not tell) was so important, in their very own annual report? In addition, if you are proud of what you say, and do, then you don’t care whether it becomes public knowledge, or not.
The other side of this coin is: if you are doing something illegal, immoral, unethical, unpopular, and/or unconstitutional, you will do whatever is necessary to see that it is kept secret.
In his book, "The ANGLO-AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT", Dr. Carroll Quigley writes,

"One wintry afternoon in February 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire, and to the world as a whole. For these men were organizing a secret society that was, for more than fifty years, to be one of the most important forces in the formulation, and execution of British imperial and foreign policy. The three men who were thus engaged were already well known in England. The leader was Cecil Rhodes, fabulously wealthy empire builder, and the most important person in South Africa. The second was William T. Stead, the famous, and probably also the most sensational, journalist of the day. The third was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend, and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential advisor of King Edward VII, and King George V. The details of this important conversation will be examined later. At present we need only point out that the three drew up a plan of organization for their secret society, and a list of original members. The plan for organization provided for an inner circle, to be known as "The Society of the Elect", and an outer circle, to be known as 'The Association of Helpers'.

Within The Society of the Elect, the real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a 'Junta of Three'. The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner. In accordance with this decision, Milner was added to the society by Stead shortly after the meeting we have described." - Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977) The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981, pg. 3
Of the Secret Societies goals, and methods of operation Quigley writes,

"The goals which Rhodes, and Milner sought, and the methods by which they hoped to achieve them were so similar by 1902 that the two are almost indistinguishable. Both sought to unite the world, and above all the English-speaking world, in a federal structure around Britain.

Both felt that this goal could best be achieved by a secret band of men united to one another by devotion to the common cause, and by personal loyalty to one another.
Both felt that this band should pursue its goal by secret political, and economic influence behind the scenes, and by the control of journalistic, educational, and propaganda agencies... - " Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977) The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981, pg. 49
Between 1910-1915 the Secret Society evolved into an international group of coconspirators called Round Table Groups that were established in seven nations:

Britain South Africa Canada New Zealand Australia India United States

(The British Round Table was actually created in England in Feb. 5, 1891. In the US it is called the Council on foreign Relations, in England it is the Royal Institute for International Affairs, in Canada the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, in Chile it is the Chilean Council on Foreign Relations, and so on.)
In 1920 the Secret Society evolved into the Institutes for International Affairs, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Many of the founding fathers belonged to America's first intelligence agency the INQUIRY.
The CFR could not accomplish their goals without complicity of the mainstream news media, which they absolutely control with an iron fist. They do this using psychological operations (PSYOPS). The RAND Corp. is one of the chief users of this technique.
This is clearly explained by the following Internet message:

"Not many people have heard of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) or know how they operate. This is not an accident, the group has purposely maintained a low profile. The CFR is a branch of an international group of coconspirators called the Round Table Group. This group has been controlling public opinion throughout the world for over 100 years. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have defined psychological operations (PSYOPS) as those that: "include psychological warfare, and, in addition, encompass those political, military, economic, and ideological actions planned, and conducted to create in neutral or friendly foreign groups the emotions, attitudes, or behavior to support achievement of national objectives." Another proposal, "develops the concept of 'strategic psychological operations' as aimed at influencing, and shaping decision-makers' power to govern, or control their followers." The American people, are among the groups being targeted, and controlled. "Tactics of Deception" are formalized psychological warfare techniques. "Tactics of Deception" build a psychological environment that differs from the material environment. "Tactics of deception" are used to create false reality worlds. In terms of perceptual psychology, "Tactics of Deception" provoke illusory precepts. To influence behavior the deception must follow three basic rules.

First, the deception must be "reasonable"; second there must be no simple way of checking the facts in the case; and third the use of deception should not discredit a source which may have valuable future potential. One way to stop this group is to expose them, and their techniques to the people they are manipulating. One "Tactic of Deception" used to achieve Council on Foreign Relations aims, is to place Council members on both sides of an issue. Another "Tactic of Deception" is to use CFR control of the legal, legislative, and court systems to create the perception that laws are being followed when in fact, Lawyers, Legislators, and Justices are committing blatant illegalities to further CFR aims.
A third "Tactic of Deception" is simply to lie." http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807
Another excellent example of deception and cover up is the book, "The Kennedy Tapes".
Two CFR members, Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, supposedly listened to all of President John F. Kennedy audio tapes and wrote this book quoting all of the interesting facts so as to assure the public that there were no other important statements made on these tapes that the public would care to know about.
There were to motives involved here:

(1) to print only what the Elite wanted printed about the JFK assassination (2) to throw any other potential researchers off the trail

This was a very grueling task of listening to hundreds of hours of taped conversations.
Therefore, other researchers should just "take their word" that they had printed all of the interesting facts from these tapes. I suspect that two non-CFR researchers would have written an entirely different book.
Historian Michael Beschloss listened to the White House tapes transcribed by Lyndon Johnson during his time in office, and wrote a book, "Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964".
Is it not strange that this author is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations?
As Peter Grose stated in his Council on Foreign Relations Book, Continuing the Inquiry (1996) on page 5:

"They (the British) proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with one branch in London, the other in New York."

The headquarters for the CFR is:

The Harold Pratt House located at 58 East 68th Street New York City, New York 10021

Oddly enough, this building is located just across the street from the Russian (former Soviet) Embassy.
Trilateral Commission (TC)
In 1973, David Rockefeller asked Zbigniew Brzezinski to put together an organization of the top political, and business leaders from around the World.
He called this group the Trilateral Commission (TC).
According to an information sheet supplied to me by the TC, dated March 23, 1994:

"The European Community, North America (US and Canada), and Japan - the three main democratic industrialized areas of the world - are the three sides of the Trilateral Commission. The Commission’s members are about 325 distinguished citizens, with a variety of leadership responsibilities, from these three regions.

When the first triennium of the Trilateral Commission was launched in 1973, the most immediate purpose was to draw together - at a time of considerable friction among governments - the highest level unofficial group possible to look together at the common problems facing our three areas.
At a deeper level, there was a sense that the United States was no longer in such a singular leadership position as it had been in earlier post-World War II years, and that a more shared form of leadership - including Europe, and Japan in particular - would be needed for the international system to navigate successfully the major challenges of the coming years.
These purposes continue to inform the Commission’s work. The rise of Japan, and progress of the European Community over the past twenty years - particularly in the world economy - have validated the vision of the Commission’s founders. At the same time, the end of the Cold War calls for a fresh vision of what this outward-looking partnership can accomplish in the coming years. The opportunities are remarkable, and yet, with the welcome end of the old Soviet threat, part of the ‘glue’ holding our regions together has dissolved. Helping meet that leadership challenge is at the heart of the Trilateral Commission effort. The full Commission gathers once each year - in Lisbon in 1992, in Washington in 1993, in Tokyo in 1994." (In Copenhagen, Denmark in 1995.)
The above are their words. Below are words of those who see this group in a different light.
The New World Order, by Pat Robertson, 1991, Page 102, states:

"In 1970 a young Polish intellectual named Zbigniew Brzezinski foresaw the rising economic power of Japan, and postwar Europe. Brzezinski idealized the theories of Karl Marx. In his book, Between Two Ages, as in subsequent writings, he argued that balance-of-power politics was out, and world-order politics was in.

The initial world order was to be a trilateral economic linkage between Japan, Europe, and the United States. David Rockefeller funded Brzezinski, and called together an organization, named the Trilateral Commission, with Brzezinski as its first executive secretary, and director. The stated goals of the Trilateral Commission are: 'Close Trilateral cooperation in keeping the peace, in managing the world economy, in fostering economic redevelopment, and alleviating world poverty will improve the chances of a smooth, and peaceful evolution of the global system.'"
The Shadows of Power, by James Perloff, 1988, pages 154-156, states:

"How did the TC begin? ‘The Trilateral Commission,’ wrote Christopher Lydon in the July 1977 Atlantic, ‘was David Rockefeller’s brainchild.’ George Franklin, North American secretary of the Trilateral Commission, stated that it ‘was entirely David Rockefeller’s idea originally.’ Helping the CFR chairman develop the concept was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who laid the first stone in Foreign Affairs in 1970: ‘A new, and bolder approach is needed - creation of a community of the developed nations which can effectively address itself to the larger concerns confronting mankind. In addition to the United States, and Western Europe, Japan ought to be included ... A council representing the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, with regular meetings of the heads of governments as well as some small standing machinery, would be a good start.’ That same year, Brzezinski elaborated these thoughts in his book Between Two Ages. It shows Brzezinski to be a classic CFR man - a globalist more than lenient toward Communism.

He declared that, ‘National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept’, and that ‘Marxism represents a further vital, and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man, and a victory of reason over belief...’ The Trilateral Commission was formally established in 1973, and consisted of leaders in business, banking, government, and mass media from North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
David Rockefeller was founding chairman, and Brzezinski founding director of the North American branch, most of whose members were also in the CFR. In the Wall Street Journal, David Rockefeller explained that, ‘the Trilateral Commission is, in reality, a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding, and cooperation among international allies.’ But, it was not all so innocent according to Jeremiah Novak, who wrote in the Atlantic (July 1977): ‘The Trilateralists’ emphasis on international economics is not entirely disinterested, for the oil crisis forced many developing nations, with doubtful repayment abilities, to borrow excessively. All told, private multinational banks, particularly Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan, have loaned nearly $52 billion to developing countries.
An overhauled IMF would provide another source of credit for these nations, and would take the big private banks off the hook. This proposal is the cornerstone of the Trilateral plan. Senator Barry Goldwater put it less mercifully. In his book With No Apologies, he termed the Commission, ‘David Rockefeller’s newest international cabal’, and said, ‘It is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial, and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.’ Zbigniew Brzezinski showed how serious TC ambitions were in the July 1973 Foreign Affairs, stating that, ‘without closer American-European-Japanese cooperation the major problems of today cannot be effectively tackled, and... the active promotion of such trilateral cooperation must now become the central priority of US policy.’ The best way to effect this would be for a Trilateralist to soon become President. One did (Jimmy Carter)...
In 1973, Carter dined with the CFR chairman (David Rockefeller) at the latter’s Tarrytown, New York estate. Present was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was helping Rockefeller screen prospects for the Trilateral Commission.
Brzezinski later told Peter Pringle of the London Sunday Times that, ‘we were impressed that Carter had opened up trade offices for the state of Georgia in Brussels, and Tokyo. That seemed to fit perfectly into the concept of the Trilateral.’ Carter became a founding member of the (Trilateral) Commission - and his destiny became calculable. Senator Barry Goldwater wrote: ‘David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be their ideal candidate. They helped him win the nomination, and the presidency.
To accomplish this purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient to the wealth of the great tax-free foundations - and the media controllers represented in the membership of the CFR, and the Trilateral.’ Seven months before the Democratic nominating convention, the Gallup Poll found less than four percent of Democrats favoring Jimmy Carter for President.
But, almost overnight - like Willkie, and Eisenhower before him - he became the candidate."
This is probably one of the very best illustrations of the great power of the Elite.
They can make or break any president or candidate for president. They made Jimmy Carter in his efforts to become president, and broke Senator Barry Goldwater in his failed attempt.
The TC membership is made up of present, and past,

Presidents Ambassadors Secretaries of State Wall Street investors international bankers foundation executives Think Tank executives lobbyist lawyers NATO, and Pentagon military leaders wealthy industrialist media owners, and executives university presidents, and key professors select Senators, and Congressmen wealthy entrepreneurs

They hold annual secret meetings including only members, and very select guests.

"The Trilateral Commission doesn't run the world, the Council on Foreign Relations does that!" by Winston Lord Assistant Secretary of State, the U. S. State Department.

The Trilateral Commission's US headquarters is located at:

345 East 46th Street, Suite 711 New York, NY 10017

Level of Involvement by Elite Members Do I think that everyone who belongs to one of these secret organizations is EVIL? Absolutely NOT.
If you look at the Elite as though they were an archery target, then:

Center or Bulls Eye - Is made up of the Czar and the members of the Inner Circle. They are the decision makers and are therefore 100% informed and involved in the Global Union movement. David Rockefeller is the only "obvious" member of this group. We can speculate about the members of the Inner Circle, but we will probably never have these speculations confirmed.

Inner Ring - This group is made up of the Officers & Directors and triple members of all three Elite groups. They are probably 90% informed by the Czar and the members of the Inner Circle, and are heavily involved in the Global Union movement (see the preceding listing and following charts for these members.)
Center Ring - This group is made up of the leaders, implementers and double members of the three Elite Groups, and who are probably 80% informed by the Czar and the members of the Inner Circle, and are moderately involved in the Global Union movement.
Outer Ring - These members are included for camouflage purposes only, and are made up of many of those who belong to only the CFR. These members are aware of only about 50% or less of the goals and objectives of the Global Union movement. A large number of these people are members for ego and social reasons only, and would very likely resign immediately, when they find out what the Global Union is "really" up to.
An example is Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the Hollywood actor, who probably falls completely off the above target. He would be classified as true camouflage. Another example of another possible member of the Outer Ring is Ben J. Wattenberg.
He would be in the Outer Ring if he told the absolute truth on C-SPAN, with Bryan Lamb, on August 29, 1995, when he stated,
"I plead guilty to being a member of the CFR, and I only pay my dues, but never, or rarely attends their meetings." If he was truthful, I would place him in the Outer Ring. On the other hand, the CFR's bylaws absolutely prohibit their members from discussing this Elite organization.
For this reason, he could have just been complying with their bylaws, and in all reality, he may be a very active member, and really belongs in one of the inner rings.

Books on Epistemology, Critical thinking, beliefs etc - A comprehensive list

A comprehensive list of books that might be of interest to people whom want to, or do practice SE.
They can also work as book recommendations for people whom you have spoken to, that want to read something that might improve their thinking or as gifts.
I have not read most of these, thus I can not personally vouch for them or recommend one over the other.
But if you do read any of them, or have any opinion it would be nice if you could create a post.
I'm not affiliated with Goodreads, but linked to them since they have links to several sources including libraries if you want to get any one of these, and often some quality reviews.
How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43885240-how-to-have-impossible-conversations by Peter Boghossian (Goodreads Author), James A. Lindsay (Goodreads Author)
3.99 · Rating details · 928 ratings
"This is a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate, and gently persuade. The authors admit to getting it wrong in their own past conversations. One by one, I recognize the same mistakes in me. The world would be a better place if everyone read this book." -- Richard Dawkins, author of Science in the Soul and Outgrowing God
In our current political climate, it seems impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone who has a different opinion. Whether you're online, in a classroom, an office, a town hall -- or just hoping to get through a family dinner with a stubborn relative -- dialogue shuts down when perspectives clash. Heated debates often lead to insults and shaming, blocking any possibility of productive discourse. Everyone seems to be on a hair trigger.
In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation -- whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
4.10 · Rating details · 12,354 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774088.Difficult_Conversations
Whether you're dealing with an under performing employee, disagreeing with your spouse about money or child-rearing, negotiating with a difficult client, or simply saying "no," or "I'm sorry," or "I love you," we attempt or avoid difficult conversation every day. Based on fifteen years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations walks you through a step-by-step proven approach to having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success.
You will learn: -- how to start the conversation without defensiveness -- why what is not said is as important as what is -- ways of keeping and regaining your balance in the face of attacks and accusations -- how to decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation
Filled with examples from everyday life, Difficult Conversations will help you on your job, at home, or out of the world. It is a book you will turn to again and again for advice, practical skills, and reassurance.
The Thinker's Guide to Socratic Questioning by Dr. Linda Elder
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7276284-the-thinker-s-guide-to-socratic-questioning
Focuses on the mechanics of Socratic dialogue, on the conceptual tools that critical thinking brings to Socratic dialogue, and on the importance of questioning in cultivating the disciplined mind.
About author:
Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and a prominent authority on critical thinking. She is President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking.
From a review:
"...it is primarily a set of instructions detailing how to lead a Socratic dialog among (different ages of) K-12 students."
-Feliks
A Manual for Creating Atheists
by Peter Boghossian (Goodreads Author), Michael Shermer (Foreword) 3.93 · Rating details · 1,983 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17937621-a-manual-for-creating-atheists
For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith—and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith—but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than twenty years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition, and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
by Michael Shermer 3.93 · Rating details · 6,985 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9754534-the-believing-brain
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.
Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life
by Richard Paul,Linda Elder 3.93 · Rating details · 1,082 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17296839-critical-thinking
Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover. Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth Ñ and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life.
The Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking by Linda Elder,Richard Paul
3.89 · Rating details · 163 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19227921-the-thinker-s-guide-to-analytic-thinking
This guide focuses on the intellectual skills that enable one to analyze anything one might think about - questions, problems, disciplines, subjects, etc. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis.
It is based on the assumption that all reasoning can be taken apart and analyzed for quality.
This guide introduces the elements of reasoning as implicit in all reasoning. It begins with this idea - that whenever we think, we think for a purpose, within a point of view, based on assumptions, leading to implications and consequences. We use data, facts and experiences (information), to make inferences and judgments,based on concepts and theories to answer a question or solve a problem. Thus the elements of thought are: purpose, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications and point of view. In this guide, authors Linda Elder and Richard Paul explain, exemplify and contextualize these elements or structures of thought, showing the importance of analyzing reasoning in every part of human life. This guide can be used as a supplement to any text or course at the college level; and it may be used for improving thinking in personal and professional life.
The Thinker's Guide to Intellectual Standards by Linda Elder, Richard Paul
4.19 · Rating details · 16 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19017637-the-thinker-s-guide-to-intellectual-standards
Humans routinely assess thinking – their own thinking, and that of others, and yet they don’t necessarily use standards for thought that are reasonable, rational, sound.
To think well, people need to routinely meet intellectual standards, standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic, fairness, significance, and so forth.
In this guide authors Elder and Paul offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language. They look at the opposites of these standards. They argue for their contextualization within subjects and disciplines. And, they call attention to the forces that undermine their skilled use in thinking well. At present intellectual standards tend to be either taught implicitly, or ignored in instruction. Yet because they are essential to high quality reasoning in every part of human life, they should be explicitly taught and explicitly understood.
The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide by Gleb Tsipursky (Goodreads Author) 4.24 · Rating details · 63 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36800752-the-truth-seeker-s-handbook
How do you know whether something is true? How do you convince others to believe the facts?
Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors - predictable mistakes that cause us to believe comfortable lies over inconvenient truths. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole.
Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws.
This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality.
With examples from daily life and an engaging style, the book will provide you with the skills to avoid thinking errors and help others to do so, preventing disasters and facilitating success for yourself, those you care about, and our society.
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
by Robert A. Burton 3.90 · Rating details · 2,165 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2740964-on-being-certain
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know.
He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge.
In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact.
Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason.
But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know.
Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking
by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley
3.94 · Rating details · 1,290 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394398.Asking_the_Right_Questions
The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.
On Truth by Simon Blackburn 3.60 · Rating details · 62 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722220-on-truth
Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eternal truth, or is truth simply a matter of perspective, of linguistic or cultural vantage point?
In this concise book Simon Blackburn provides an accessible explanation of what truth is and how we might think about it.
The first half of the book details several main approaches to how we should think about, and decide, what is true.
These are philosophical theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, deflationism, and others.
He then examines how those approaches relate to truth in several contentious domains: art, ethics, reasoning, religion, and the interpretation of texts.
Blackburn's overall message is that truth is often best thought of not as a product or an end point that is 'finally' achieved, but--as the American pragmatist thinkers thought of it--as an ongoing process of inquiry. The result is an accessible and tour through some of the deepest and thorniest questions philosophy has ever tackled
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
4.16 · Rating details · 317,352 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZNhf1bAIxd&rank=1
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John A. Bargh (Goodreads Author)
3.97 · Rating details · 788 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it
Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times—giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.
For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.
Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction.
With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more.
Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better.
Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38315.Fooled_by_Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 4.07 · Rating details · 49,010 ratings
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.
Philosophy books
Epistemology by Richard Feldman 3.84 · Rating details · 182 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387295.Epistemology
Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. KEY TOPICS: Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism.
Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology by Michael J. Williams
3.79 · Rating details · 86 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477904.Problems_of_Knowledge
"What is epistemology or 'the theory of knowledge'? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge 'philosophical'? And why do some philosophers argue that epistemology - perhaps even philosophy itself - is dead?" "
In this introduction, Michael Williams answers these questions, showing how epistemological theorizing is sensitive to a range of questions about the nature, limits, methods, and value of knowing.
He pays special attention to the challenge of philosophical scepticism: does our 'knowledge' rest on brute assumptions? Does the rational outlook undermine itself?"
Williams explains and criticizes all the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on human knowledge, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory, and 'naturalistic' theories. As an alternative to all of them, he defends his distinctive contextualist approach.
As well as providing an accessible introduction for any reader approaching the subject for the first time, this book incorporates Williams's own ideas which will be of interest to all philosophers concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge by Robert Audi
3.54 · Rating details · 176 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477976.Epistemology
This comprehensive book introduces the concepts and theories central for understanding knowledge. It aims to reach students who have already done an introductory philosophy course. Topics covered include perception and reflection as grounds of knowledge, and the nature, structure, and varieties of knowledge. The character and scope of knowledge in the crucial realms of ethics, science and religion are also considered. Unique features of Epistemology:

Provides a comprehensive survey of basic concepts and major theories
Gives an up-to-date account of important developments in the field
Contains many lucid examples to support ideas
Cites key literature in an annotated bibliography.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14829260-the-oxford-handbook-of-thinking-and-reasoning
by Keith J. Holyoak (Editor), Robert G. Morrison (Editor)
4.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning.
Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading.
Chapters include introductions to foundational issues and methods of study in the field, as well as treatment of specific types of thinking and reasoning and their application in a broad range of fields including business, education, law, medicine, music, and science.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics.
Feminist Epistemologies
(Thinking Gender) by Linda Martín Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter 4.14 · Rating details · 43 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477960.Feminist_Epistemologies
Noticed this review by an evangelical:
"I have found this an immensely suggestive book, collecting as it does essays from both prominent and rising figures in feminist philosophy of knowledge--albeit from about two decades ago. I am struck by how little impact feminist thought, even of this high and generally temperate quality, has had on evangelical theology, to the shame of my guild."
-John
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
by Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons 3.91 Rating details · 13,537 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7783191-the-invisible-gorilla
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely 3.94 · Rating details · 13,620 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426114-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty
The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves.
Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty?
Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat.
From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty.
Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis.
But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not.
For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.
But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.
How to Stop Believing in Hell: a Schizophrenic's Religious Experience: Intellectual Honesty and Hallucinations - A Memoir
by Robert Clayton Kimball
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22020049-how-to-stop-believing-in-hell
it was amazing 5.00 · Rating details · 1 rating Kirkus Reviews:
“…Kimball’s debut explores his hallucinatory religious mania, from his early childhood onward, beginning when he attended Catholic school. The early pages guide readers through narratives of his uncomfortable childhood traumas, sometimes in ugly detail…. Various other moments of shame revolved around school. Finding sex repugnant and sinful, he decided early on to remain celibate; he avoided sex until his eventual institutionalization. Meanwhile, hallucinatory monsters—including Lorus, “a turbulent face, golden like the comedy mask…”—and company pushed him away from religion, though he did convert to Pentecostalism in spite of them. Through this process, Kimball developed a solipsistic worldview, in which he was never sure others existed. Ultimately, though, it was his fear of damnation that became his greatest obsession, driving all the rest of his delusions and fears. He does exhibit a flair for description…: “On summer evenings, I liked to stand on the arroyo side of the house at night, alone, feeling the desert breeze through the tamarisks and smelling the clean desert smells in the warm darkness. The long row of tamarisks, with its tens of thousands of insects of a thousand species, hummed like the telephone network in The Castle, a beautiful, accidental music.’”
Author’s Description:
How to Stop Believing in Hell, describes the narrator's passage from a golden childhood to an adolescence of cringing guilt and religious fear. By the age of thirty, he had become a deranged street person, screaming horrible obscenities on crowded sidewalks in broad daylight. He desperately tried to stop but couldn’t. He was still filled with the fear of Hell. Then he had a spiritual awakening, broke free of his dementia, and learned to act deliberately. A paperback copy of this book can be purchased through my publisher, Chipmunka Publishing at their web site.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (Goodreads Author)
4.27 · Rating details · 59,893 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age
by Theodore Schick Jr. Lewis Vaughn, Martin Gardner (Foreword)
4.00 · Rating details · 530 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41756.How_to_Think_about_Weird_Things
This text serves well as a supplemental text in:

critical thinking
logic
introduction to philosophy
philosophy of science
epistemology
metaphysics
introduction to psychology
anomalistic psychology
perception and cognition

as well as any introductory science course.
It has been used in all of the courses mentioned above as well as introductory biology, introductory physics, and introductory chemistry courses. It could also serve as a main text for courses in evaluation of the paranormal, philosophical implications of the paranormal, occult beliefs, and pseudoscience.
Popular Statistics
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
by Charles Wheelan 3.94 · Rating details · 10,367 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17986418-naked-statistics
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.
And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't by Nate Silver
3.98 · Rating details · 43,804 ratings · 3,049 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise
One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012
New York Times Bestseller
"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." -New York Times Book Review
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." -Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism." -New York Review of Books
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.
Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way: Understanding Statistics and Probability with Star Wars, Lego, and Rubber Ducks
by Will Kurt 4.21 · Rating details · 128 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392893-bayesian-statistics-the-fun-way
Fun guide to learning Bayesian statistics and probability through unusual and illustrative examples.
Probability and statistics are increasingly important in a huge range of professions. But many people use data in ways they don't even understand, meaning they aren't getting the most from it. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way will change that.
This book will give you a complete understanding of Bayesian statistics through simple explanations and un-boring examples. Find out the probability of UFOs landing in your garden, how likely Han Solo is to survive a flight through an asteroid shower, how to win an argument about conspiracy theories, and whether a burglary really was a burglary, to name a few examples.
By using these off-the-beaten-track examples, the author actually makes learning statistics fun. And you'll learn real skills, like how to:

How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief
Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for
Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions
Calculate distributions to see the range of your data
Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from them

Next time you find yourself with a sheaf of survey results and no idea what to do with them, turn to Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way to get the most value from your data.

Books that promote and can improve critical thinking

A comprehensive list of books that might be of interest to people that want to read something that would improve their thinking or some friends?
I have not read many of these, thus I can not personally vouch for all of them or recommend one over the other.
I'm not affiliated with Goodreads, but linked to them since I wanted to include the ratings and they have links to several different sources including libraries if you want to borrow or acquire any one of these, and often some quality reviews.
I posted this list in /books, but could not crosspost to here, so I post it here.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
by Michael Shermer 3.93 · Rating details · 6,985 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9754534-the-believing-brain
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.
Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life
by Richard Paul, Linda Elder
3.93 · Rating details · 1,082 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17296839-critical-thinking
Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover.
Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth Ñ and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life.
The Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking by Linda Elder,Richard Paul
3.89 · Rating details · 163 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19227921-the-thinker-s-guide-to-analytic-thinking
This guide focuses on the intellectual skills that enable one to analyze anything one might think about - questions, problems, disciplines, subjects, etc. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis.
It is based on the assumption that all reasoning can be taken apart and analyzed for quality.
This guide introduces the elements of reasoning as implicit in all reasoning. It begins with this idea - that whenever we think, we think for a purpose, within a point of view, based on assumptions, leading to implications and consequences. We use data, facts and experiences (information), to make inferences and judgments,based on concepts and theories to answer a question or solve a problem. Thus the elements of thought are: purpose, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications and point of view. In this guide, authors Linda Elder and Richard Paul explain, exemplify and contextualize these elements or structures of thought, showing the importance of analyzing reasoning in every part of human life. This guide can be used as a supplement to any text or course at the college level; and it may be used for improving thinking in personal and professional life.
The Thinker's Guide to Intellectual Standards by Linda Elder, Richard Paul
4.19 · Rating details · 16 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19017637-the-thinker-s-guide-to-intellectual-standards
Humans routinely assess thinking – their own thinking, and that of others, and yet they don’t necessarily use standards for thought that are reasonable, rational, sound.
To think well, people need to routinely meet intellectual standards, standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic, fairness, significance, and so forth.
In this guide authors Elder and Paul offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language. They look at the opposites of these standards. They argue for their contextualization within subjects and disciplines. And, they call attention to the forces that undermine their skilled use in thinking well. At present intellectual standards tend to be either taught implicitly, or ignored in instruction. Yet because they are essential to high quality reasoning in every part of human life, they should be explicitly taught and explicitly understood.
The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide by Gleb Tsipursky (Goodreads Author) 4.24 · Rating details · 63 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36800752-the-truth-seeker-s-handbook
How do you know whether something is true? How do you convince others to believe the facts?
Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors - predictable mistakes that cause us to believe comfortable lies over inconvenient truths. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole.
Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws.
This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality.
With examples from daily life and an engaging style, the book will provide you with the skills to avoid thinking errors and help others to do so, preventing disasters and facilitating success for yourself, those you care about, and our society.
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
by Robert A. Burton 3.90 · Rating details · 2,165 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2740964-on-being-certain
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know.
He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge.
In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact.
Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason.
But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know.
Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
by Christopher Chabris,Daniel Simons 3.91 · Rating details · 13,537 ratings · 704 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7783191-the-invisible-gorilla
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking
by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley
3.94 · Rating details · 1,290 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394398.Asking_the_Right_Questions
The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.
On Truth by Simon Blackburn 3.60 · Rating details · 62 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722220-on-truth
Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eternal truth, or is truth simply a matter of perspective, of linguistic or cultural vantage point?
In this concise book Simon Blackburn provides an accessible explanation of what truth is and how we might think about it.
The first half of the book details several main approaches to how we should think about, and decide, what is true.
These are philosophical theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, deflationism, and others.
He then examines how those approaches relate to truth in several contentious domains: art, ethics, reasoning, religion, and the interpretation of texts.
Blackburn's overall message is that truth is often best thought of not as a product or an end point that is 'finally' achieved, but--as the American pragmatist thinkers thought of it--as an ongoing process of inquiry. The result is an accessible and tour through some of the deepest and thorniest questions philosophy has ever tackled
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
4.16 · Rating details · 317,352 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZNhf1bAIxd&rank=1
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John A. Bargh (Goodreads Author)
3.97 · Rating details · 788 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it
Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times—giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.
For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.
Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction.
With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more.
Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better.
Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38315.Fooled_by_Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 4.07 · Rating details · 49,010 ratings
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.
Philosophy books
Epistemology by Richard Feldman 3.84 · Rating details · 182 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387295.Epistemology
Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. KEY TOPICS: Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism.
Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology by Michael J. Williams
3.79 · Rating details · 86 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477904.Problems_of_Knowledge
"What is epistemology or 'the theory of knowledge'? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge 'philosophical'? And why do some philosophers argue that epistemology - perhaps even philosophy itself - is dead?" "
In this introduction, Michael Williams answers these questions, showing how epistemological theorizing is sensitive to a range of questions about the nature, limits, methods, and value of knowing.
He pays special attention to the challenge of philosophical scepticism: does our 'knowledge' rest on brute assumptions? Does the rational outlook undermine itself?"
Williams explains and criticizes all the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on human knowledge, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory, and 'naturalistic' theories. As an alternative to all of them, he defends his distinctive contextualist approach.
As well as providing an accessible introduction for any reader approaching the subject for the first time, this book incorporates Williams's own ideas which will be of interest to all philosophers concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Philosophy: The Basics
by Nigel Warburton 3.84 · Rating details · 1,928 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31854.Philosophy
Now in its fourth edition, Nigel Warburton's best-selling book gently eases the reader into the world of philosophy. Each chapter considers a key area of philosophy, explaining and exploring the basic ideas and themes.
What is philosophy? Can you prove God exists? Is there an afterlife? How do we know right from wrong? Should you ever break the law? Is the world really the way you think it is? How should we define Freedom of Speech? Do you know how science works? Is your mind different from your body? Can you define art? For the fourth edition, Warburton has added new sections to several chapters, revised others and brought the further reading sections up to date. If you've ever asked what is philosophy, or whether the world is really the way you think it is, then this is the book for you.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14829260-the-oxford-handbook-of-thinking-and-reasoning
by Keith J. Holyoak (Editor), Robert G. Morrison (Editor)
4.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning.
Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading.
Chapters include introductions to foundational issues and methods of study in the field, as well as treatment of specific types of thinking and reasoning and their application in a broad range of fields including business, education, law, medicine, music, and science.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics.
Feminist Epistemologies
(Thinking Gender) by Linda Martín Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter 4.14 · Rating details · 43 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477960.Feminist_Epistemologies
Noticed this review by an evangelical:
"I have found this an immensely suggestive book, collecting as it does essays from both prominent and rising figures in feminist philosophy of knowledge--albeit from about two decades ago. I am struck by how little impact feminist thought, even of this high and generally temperate quality, has had on evangelical theology, to the shame of my guild."
-John
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely 3.94 · Rating details · 13,620 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426114-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty
The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves.
Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty?
Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat.
From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty.
Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis.
But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not.
For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.
But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (Goodreads Author)
4.27 · Rating details · 59,893 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
What Is the Name of This Book?
by Raymond M. Smullyan
4.24 · Rating details · 757 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_
If you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan — a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author — presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into Gödel’s undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle
The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
by Eugenia Cheng 3.55 · Rating details · 740 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38400400-the-art-of-logic-in-an-illogical-world
How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world
In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can't be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic--for example, emotion--is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.
How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age
by Theodore Schick Jr. Lewis Vaughn, Martin Gardner (Foreword)
4.00 · Rating details · 530 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41756.How_to_Think_about_Weird_Things
This text serves well as a supplemental text in:

critical thinking
logic
introduction to philosophy
philosophy of science
epistemology
metaphysics
introduction to psychology
anomalistic psychology
perception and cognition

How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief
Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for
Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions
Calculate distributions to see the range of your data
Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from them

Next time you find yourself with a sheaf of survey results and no idea what to do with them, turn to Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way to get the most value from your data.
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian (Goodreads Author), Tom Griffiths (Goodreads Author)
4.15 · Rating details · 19,580 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25666050-algorithms-to-live-by
A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind
All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such issues for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us.
In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch 4.12 · Rating details · 5,026 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
In this book David Deutsch argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method
by Daniel J. Levitin
3.76 · Rating details · 3,181 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28504537-a-field-guide-to-lies
From The New York Times bestselling author of THE ORGANIZED MIND and THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever.
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.
It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information?
Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking.
Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media.
We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't.
We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives.
This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it.
Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks!
"Levitin is brilliant. Everyone should read A Field Guide to Lies."—Chris Matthews
"Eloquent."—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Mr. Levitin is the perfect guide...If everyone could adopt the level of healthy statistical skepticism that Mr. Levitin would like, political debate would be in much better shape.”—The Economist
"The timing could not be better … for Daniel J. Levitin’s new book… a survival manual for the post-factual era…in the struggle against error and ignorance, lies and mistakes, he is both engaging and rewarding."—Literary Review of Canada
"Who knew that a book about statistics could be so riveting!"—Dallas Public Library
"Confirmation bias is a growing problem in the digital information age. As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a giant pattern detector. If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true…The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."—John Cleese

odds calculator william hill video

William Hill is operated by WHG (International) Limited, a company registered in Gibraltar. William Hill is licensed and regulated by the UK Gambling Commission ( Number: 000-039225 R-319373-009 ) for customers in Great Britain, and licensed by the Gibraltar Government and regulated by the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner (RGL no. 034 & 042) for all other customers. William Hill is a registered I.B.A.S bookmaker. For customers outside of Great Britain, this website is operated by William Hill Global PLC, a company registered in Malta with registration number C96298 and registered office at William Hill Global PLC, Tagliaferro Business Centre, Level 7, High Street, Sliema SLM 1549, Malta. William Hill is a registered I.B.A.S bookmaker. For customers outside of Great Britain, this website is operated by William Hill Global PLC, a company registered in Malta with registration number C96298 and registered office at William Hill Global PLC, Tagliaferro Business Centre, Level 7, High Street, Sliema SLM 1549, Malta. Τα αποτελέσματα δεν είναι 100% εγγυημένα και ίσως να μην παρουσιάζουν τα κέρδη που θα πιστωθούν στο λογαριασμό σας όταν ολοκληρωθεί ο στοιχηματισμός. William Hill bookmakers have a fantastic online bet calculator for working out what you stand to gain from your bets, as well as accumulated odds and other information. Their bet calculator is simple and yet should provide you with all information you are looking for concerning calculated returns, combined odds and various types of bet such as Yankees and Patents. Bet on Football with William Hill's online Match Result and Both Teams to Score coupon. Great odds and great excitement from the world's top online bookmaker. The win part of the bet pays out at the win-odds quoted, while the place part pays out at a fraction of the win odds, with place terms being important. Why not try William Hill’s Bet Calculator to help disco ver how much you could potentially win? Place terms – for each-way betting it’s crucial to understand the place terms of each race. The best Football Betting is here! Bet on football at William Hill and enjoy a fantastic range of bets including live football betting. Popular choices, such as Draw No Bet, BTTS and team and manager specials, are all available on the teams you back and leagues you follow, and with fantastic odds, there is always an attractive punt.

Free Bet Calculator Calculate your bet return ⇒ William Hill

odds calculator william hill

odds calculator william hill - win

A comprehensive list of books that will help you think clearly

Brief Description of The Elite Conspiracy - The Bilderberg's, Council of Foreign Relations , and Trilateral Commission. PART 2

Books on Epistemology, Critical thinking, beliefs etc - A comprehensive list

Books that promote and can improve critical thinking

odds calculator william hill video

odds calculator william hill top