"The bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your beliefs and to know what you don't know, which can position you for success at work and happiness at home. The difficulty of rethinking our assumptions is surprisingly common--maybe even fundamentally human. Our ways of thinking become habits that we don't bother to question, and mental laziness leads us to prefer the ease of old...

Bestselling author Shermer presents a comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.

Explores the complexity of truth and the ways that people take advantage of this complexity to use and abuse neutral truths to suit their own agendas in politics, business, the media, and everyday life.

Looks at the state of knowledge in the American public, and demonstrates how many areas of knowledge correlate with quality of life, politics, and behavior, arguing that being knowledgeable has significant value even when facts can be looked up with little effort.

Hume's Treatise was published before he was thirty (after its publication in 1739-40 he wrote that it 'fell dead-born from the press'). It is nothing less than an attempt to extend the Copernican Revolution to philosophy - to put to the test of experience a complete system of the moral sciences which had hitherto gone unquestioned. But Hume was no rationalist: from his viewpoint of informed scepticism he could see man not as a religious creation,...

"With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed, Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making--a gap that threatens...

"These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait "hot takes" stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind...