Showing titles in Philosophy

More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future.

In this perceptive and provocative look at everything from computer software that requires faster processors and more support staff to antibiotics that breed resistant strains of bacteria, Edward Tenner offers a virtual encyclopedia of what he calls "revenge effects" - the unintended consequences of the mechanical, chemical, biological, and medical forms of ingenuity that have been hallmarks of the progressive, improvement-obsessed modern age.

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence.

In 1990, Peter Larson, with his team of commercial fossil hunters from the Black Hills Institute, discovered the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen in history. He dubbed it "Sue" after the field paleontologist who first saw it sticking out of a sandstone cliff on the ranch of Maurice Williams, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member in South Dakota's badlands. Because the skelton was 90% complete, its study promised to yield up priceless information on the life and habits of the T Rex.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: Life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. In the 19th century, however, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything - and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit.

The world of science has been transformed. Where once astronomers sat at the controls of giant telescopes in remote locations, praying for clear skies, now they have no need to budge from their desks, as data arrives in their inbox. And what they receive is overwhelming; projects now being built provide more data in a few nights than in the whole of humanities' history of observing the universe.

This collection brings together history, science, philosophy and comedy to explore our age-old search for meaning. We live in an age of self-improvement and self-examination - lifehacking, wellbeing, self-care, mindfulness retreats - but this seemingly very modern phenomenon is a pursuit that...

Why did once-stone-faced animals evolve to be so emotionally expressive—to be us? The answer, as evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi and mathematician Tim Barber reveal, is that emotional expressions are our first and most important language—one that allows us, as social animals, to engage in highly sophisticated communications and negotiations.

Of the codified laws of nature, only one inscribes a direction to time: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics, which declares that the disorder of a closed system tends to increase as time passes. New shoes eventually scuff, our bodies weaken and die. Yet our senses tell us that miraculous order constantly emerges, too: children grow and learn; spontaneous patterns manifest in murmurations of starlings. Can it be true that the laws of our universe mandate only dissolution?

Vaccine hesitancy in America didn't begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression—not as the product of scientific misinformation.

This book is about science and how it works. It is about what it means for a paradigm to shift and what it really takes to shift it. And it is about the strange and unusual world of quantum physics and what it tells us about who we are. At the start of the 20th Century, a dramatic revolution in science occurred. Over the course of a few decades our most fundamental notions of time, space and consciousness were all being called into question. In undeniable ways, it became clear that the nature of reality is intimately interwoven with our experience of it.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Now for the first time, science writers Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell have drawn open the curtain on the left’s fear of science. As Science Left Behind reveals, vague inclinations about the wholesomeness of all things natural, the unhealthiness of the unnatural, and many other seductive fallacies have led to an epidemic of misinformation.

Former physicist Andrew Maynard threads together his love of science-fiction movies with his expertise on emerging technologies to engage, entertain, and make you think about the relationship between technology and society. Through the imagination and creativity of science-fiction movies, Maynard introduces listeners to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and the complex personal and societal challenges they present.

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities - those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means - and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism.

Do scientists speak truth to power? During the Cold War, a group of American strategists and science advisors claimed to do precisely that. Styling themselves as figures of rationality and restraint, they insisted that mutual assured destruction was the natural logic of the atomic age: as long as nuclear deterrence was credible, no one would ever shoot first. This doctrine, known as "strategic stability," became the foundation of the arms control movement. But in this counterhistory, Benjamin Wilson shows that we have misunderstood them and their efforts.

In Parascientific Revolutions, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to uncover how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres, including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals.

La comunicación de la ciencia es un elemento crucial para lograr que ésta sea realmente útil a la sociedad. Cuando hablamos de comunicación de la ciencia hablamos también de una comunicación dirigida a personas no expertas; es decir, no solo se refiere a la que se da entre científicos -que también-, sino sobre todo a la comunicación de los científicos con otros agentes sociales interesados en que la sociedad funcione, como políticos, empresarios, colectivos de profesionales muy diversos y, finalmente, con la gente de la calle.

Un estimulante ensayo sobre los cambios que el auge de la tecnología está operando en el ser humano... y los aún por llegar. Descartes creía que los organismos vivos son máquinas biológicas, sometidas como cualquier otra entidad física a las leyes del universo. Los seres humanos, en cambio, seríamos diferentes, poseedores de libre albedrío. Pero Rick Deckard, el protagonista del clásico Blade Runner, tenía serias dificultades para distinguir a un "replicante", un robot biológico, de un ser humano, y así no equivocarse a la hora de "retirar" (eufemismo de matar) a las "entidades electrónicas".

This book is the boundary between science and philosophy dissolves into a haunting exploration of existence itself. Beginning with the mysterious precision of the universe’s physical constants and ending at the silent edge of knowledge, this book traces the anthropic principle not as an answer, but as a profound and unsettling question. From the delicate balance that permits life to the strange recursion of a cosmos observed by minds it created, each chapter draws closer to a truth that cannot be fully named.

في هذا الكتاب، نتعمق في أسباب السلوكيات غير الصحية والتي أصبحت وضعنا الطبيعي لسنوات عديدة. كل منا مدير تنفيذي مخضرم في مجال التكنولوجيا حيث انغمسنا في التكنولوجيا منذ سنواتنا الأولى. لقد قضينا وقتًا في برمجة الكمبيوتر ونحن شباب في الأيام الأولى من ظهور الحاسب الشخصي. وكان كلانا من أوائل من تبنى الإنترنت. أسس فيفيك شركتين ناشئتين في مجال البرمجيات وعمل مبرمجًا ومديرًا تنفيذيًا كبيرًا في مجال التكنولوجيا في بنك استثماري كبير.