With seemingly unlimited voices shouting their message through all channels - from topical politics to how to spend our money, to how to spend other people's money, the level of volume increasing, with no simple way to sort out signal from noise.
With solutions looking for a problem to solve in our project management world all the way to the White House, we are bombarded with words and products the will supposedly make our lives better.
Here are four books that have served me well over the years in sorting out and filtering out the noise from the signal.
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The founding fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our advantage is that we might learn from their experience. |
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This is a crash course, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are. Not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions |
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This classic survey of crowd psychology offers an illuminating and entertaining look at three grad-scale swindles Originally published in England 1941, its remarkable tales of human folly reveal that the hysteria of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the junk-bond frenzy of the 1980s was far from uniquely twentieth-century phenomena |
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One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." |
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Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. |
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Democracy no longer ends in a bang, but with a whimper. The slow steady weakening of critical institutions, the judiciary, the press, and gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. There are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. And we've already passed the first ramp when we elected a president with dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured more than two centuries. Democracies work best - and survive longer - where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms: Mutual toleration - (1) competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals and (2) Forbearance - politicians exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. Challenges to our democracy starts with the extreme partisan polarization that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. It is extreme polarization the kills democracies. |
