The Cult of Smart

The Cult of Smart
Author: Fredrik deBoer
Publisher: All Points Books
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1250200385

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

The Knowledge Illusion

The Knowledge Illusion
Author: Steven Sloman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0399184341

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

Good Economics for Hard Times

Good Economics for Hard Times
Author: Abhijit V. Banerjee
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541762878

The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it. Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable. In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

Exo

Exo
Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0765336545

Award-winning author, Steven Gould, returns to the world of his classic novel Jumper in Exo, the sequel to Impulse, blending the drama of high school with world shattering consequences. Cent can teleport. So can her parents, but they are the only people in the world who can. This is not as great as you might think it would be—sure, you can go shopping in Japan and then have tea in London, but it's hard to keep a secret like that. And there are people, dangerous people, who work for governments and have guns, who want to make you do just this one thing for them. And when you're a teenage girl things get even more complicated. High school. Boys. Global climate change, refugees, and genocide. Orbital mechanics. But Cent isn't easily daunted, and neither are Davy and Millie, her parents. She's going to make some changes in the world.

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
Author: Kristin Luker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674040384

This book is both a handbook for defining and completing a research project, and an astute introduction to the neglected history and changeable philosophy of modern social science.

The Original Millennial

The Original Millennial
Author: Aerial Ellis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2016-07-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781516922642

Slackers, narcissists, entitled - the infamous cliche known of a generation born around 1980 or so. This special breed of individuals, debunking myths and assumptions, will lead a cultural shift to represent a full 75 percent of the U.S. workforce by the year 2025 thus changing the face of leadership. They are millennials who are more ambitious to see cultural change than to gain personal wealth and advancement. They are millennials with a distinctly original quality that debunks the labels of slacker or narcissist. They are creative, innovative, enterprising, influential, bold, unapologetic, and ready to solve the world's problems. They are called the original millennial. You probably know an original millennial. You may even feel you are one. Contrary to what has said or perceived, the original millennial is not lazy and selfish lacking motivation and creativity. The original millennial is a servant, an innovator, a go-getter - a leader. Here inside this book, you will discover how original millennials are impacting and influencing key areas of culture. You will meet original millennials who are dispelling the myths and stereotypes of the "Me" generation. You find the stories of millennials like me who knew early in life that they were destined to lead. You will discover that original millennials are valuable, loyal, high-performing leaders. You will find six defining areas that original millennials must master in business and community. The six lessons are: 1 - All of Us Are Entrepreneurs (Career, Entrepreneurship, Intrapraneurship); 2 - Seek to Solve A Problem (Problem Solving, Disruption, Innovation): 3 - Waiting for Permission (Ambition, Decision Making, Goal-Setting); 4 - Reflect or Direct (Influence, Access, Creativity); 5 - Profit to Fund Purpose (Profit, Passion, Purpose); 6 - Empowerment is Essential (Faith, Mindfulness, Empowerment). You will learn lessons of leadership for your own life and career. Most of all, you will take away inspiration and hope that future is in good hands with an original millennial at the helm."

Middlemarch

Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698408411

On April 10, 1994, PBS stations nationwide will air the first episode of a lavish six-part Masterpiece Theatre production of Eliot's brilliant work, Middlemarch, hosted by Russell Baker and produced by Louis Marks. The Modern Library is pleased to offer this official companion edition, complete with tie-in art and printed on acid-free paper. Unabridged.

Evolutionary Psychopathology

Evolutionary Psychopathology
Author: Marco Del Giudice
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0190670142

Mental disorders arise from neural and psychological mechanisms that have been built and shaped by natural selection across our evolutionary history. Looking at psychopathology through the lens of evolution is the only way to understand the deeper nature of mental disorders and turn a mass of behavioral, genetic, and neurobiological findings into a coherent, theoretically grounded discipline. The rise of evolutionary psychopathology is part of an exciting scientific movement in psychology and medicine -- a movement that is fundamentally transforming the way we think about health and disease. Evolutionary Psychopathology takes steps toward a unified approach to psychopathology, using the concepts of life history theory -- a biological account of how individual differences in development, physiology and behavior arise from tradeoffs in survival and reproduction -- to build an integrative framework for mental disorders. This book reviews existing evolutionary models of specific conditions and connects them in a broader perspective, with the goal of explaining the large-scale patterns of risk and comorbidity that characterize psychopathology. Using the life history framework allows for a seamless integration of mental disorders with normative individual differences in personality and cognition, and offers new conceptual tools for the analysis of developmental, genetic, and neurobiological data. The concepts presented in Evolutionary Psychopathology are used to derive a new taxonomy of mental disorders, the Fast-Slow-Defense (FSD) model. The FSD model is the first classification system explicitly based on evolutionary concepts, a biologically grounded alternative to transdiagnostic models. The book reviews a wide range of common mental disorders, discusses their classification in the FSD model, and identifies functional subtypes within existing diagnostic categories.

Active Interviewing

Active Interviewing
Author: Eric P. Kramer
Publisher: Course Technology
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Employment interviewing
ISBN: 9781435459748

Contains techniques for branding, selling, and presenting yourself at job interviews.

Honest to God

Honest to God
Author: John A. T. Robinson
Publisher: SCM Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0334053501

On first publication in the 1960s, "Honest to God" did more than instigate a passionate debate about the nature of Christian belief in a secular revolution. It epitomised the revolutionary mood of the era and articulated the anxieties of a generation.