Books by Hugo Mercier
“Hugo Mercier is a French cognitive scientist…What’s so valuable about this book is that it’s a corrective, it’s a reversal of the received knowledge, which is that we’re all gullible. If you could just get control of the media, you can control the population. People vote for Trump or for Brexit because they’ve been brainwashed. He says, ‘No, that’s not the case at all. Humans are not gullible or easily brainwashed,’ and he gives a whole lot of data as to why he believes that.” Read more...
The best books on Language and Post-Truth
Nick Enfield, Linguist
“They address one of the central questions of cognitive psychology, and also of philosophy, I suppose, which is what is reason? What’s the function of reason and rationality? They give, I think, a remarkably fresh, original and revelatory answer…Reason is meant to be humanity’s gift, our special faculty, the thing that sets us apart from the animals. Because they come from an of evolutionary psychology background, they have this question, which is: Okay, so if we evolved reason in order to help us think—which is the conventional view of what it’s for—then why is it so flawed? Why is this capacity to reason so faulty that if you bought it from a shop, you’d just send it back saying there’s a problem with it?” Read more...
The best books on Disagreeing Productively
Ian Leslie, Journalist
Interviews where books by Hugo Mercier were recommended
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1
The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding
by Dan Sperber & Hugo Mercier -
2
Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait
by John Carlin -
3
The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
by Peter Coleman -
4
Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration
by Teresa Bejan -
5
Learning Lessons From Waco: When Parties Bring Their Gods to the Negotiation Table
by Jayne Docherty
The best books on Disagreeing Productively, recommended by Ian Leslie
The best books on Disagreeing Productively, recommended by Ian Leslie
Many of us avoid conflict in our relationships with family and friends or at work, but that’s probably a mistake, says Ian Leslie, author of a number of nonfiction books on human behaviour. Here, he recommends books that offer insight into how to disagree productively, from evolutionary biology to 17th century Rhode Island, from Nelson Mandela to seemingly intractable conflicts.
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1
Language, Thought, and Reality
by Benjamin Lee Whorf -
2
The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality
by Karl Popper -
3
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch -
4
Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe
by Hugo Mercier -
5
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
by Julia Galef
The best books on Language and Post-Truth, recommended by Nick Enfield
The best books on Language and Post-Truth, recommended by Nick Enfield
The word ‘post-truth’ may only have entered the Oxford English Dictionary in the last decade, but the phenomenon it describes is much older and deeper, connected not so much to the latest internet trend as the fundamentals of human cognition and communication. Here, linguistic anthropologist Nick Enfield, a professor at the University of Sydney and a member of its fighting truth decay research node, introduces the best books to get thinking about the complex relationship between language and reality.
