|
|
|
1.
|
|
A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable—to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability, as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications—from gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality....
|
|
2.
|
|
A dazzling new work of popular science and psychology for readers who enjoyed Blink, Stumbling on Happiness, or The Black Swan.
The New York Times called the Kaplans’ look at probability in everyday life, Chances Are..., “a dizzying, exhilarating ride.” Now they take readers on a new fun-house tour—exploring the burgeoning science of why humans make mistakes. Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman’s face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the air force’s best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground? Why does giving someone power make him more likely to chew with his mouth open and pick his nose? And why is your sister going out with that biker dude? In fact, our cognitive, logical, and romantic failures may be a fair price for our extraordinary success as a species—they are the necessary cost of our adaptability. Michael and Ellen Kaplan swoop effortlessly across neurochemistry, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to answer, with both clarity and wit, the questions above—and larger ones about what it means to be human. Michael and Ellen Kaplan are mother and son, and coauthors of the bestselling Chances Are . . . : Adventures in Probability. Michael is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker who resides in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ellen is an archaeologist and cofounder of the Math Circle, a program for the exploration and enjoyment of mathematics. She is coauthor of The Art of the Infinite: The Pleasures of Mathematics and Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free. She lives in central Massachusetts. Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman’s face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the air force’s best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground? Why does giving someone power make him more likely to chew with his mouth open and pick his nose? And why is your sister going out with that biker dude?
In fact, our cognitive, logical, and romantic failures may be a fair price for our extraordinary success as a species—they are the necessary cost of our adaptability. Michael and Ellen Kaplan swoop effortlessly across neurochemistry, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to answer, with both clarity and wit, the questions above—and larger ones about what it means to be human. “Obvious logical errors are always the ones other people make. Michael and Ellen Kaplan put this self-serving idea to rest, brilliantly and wittily exploring the sources of the fallacies that infect the thinking of us all. Bozo Sapiens is a book rich not only in examples, but in wisdom. Every one of its readers will learn from it.”—Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
“The mother-son co-authors turn their considerable authorial skills and wit to human behavior, from our isolated cave-dwelling ancestors to today’s globalized, interconnected world . . . Gourmet reading—rich in ideas, global references and amusing and provocative examples, served with great style.”—Kirkus Reviews ...
|
|
