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Sto caricando le informazioni... Mental immunity : infectious ideas, mind parasites, and the search for a better way to think (edizione 2021)di Andy Norman, Steven Pinker (Writer Of Foreword.)
Informazioni sull'operaMental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think di Andy Norman
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. All the useful or informative bits of this book could be easily covered in a 10 page essay; Norman rabbits on needlessly about things like his teaching experiences or the history of medical immunology to bring his subject to book-length. The overall tone reads as though the anticipated audience is slack-jawed undergrads who smoke a lot of weed, with unnecessary repetitions and a charmingly condescending warning about the "difficulty" of the concept he is about to introduce. He also seems to be laboring under the delusion that he has developed a revolutionary concept; if he has, nobody would know since his thesis is so mired in unnecessary verbiage. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. Covid denial persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. Anti-vaxxers compromise public health. Conspiracy thinking hijacks minds and incites mob violence. Toxic partisanship is cleaving nations, and climate denial has pushed our planet to the brink. Meanwhile, American Nazis march openly in the streets, and Flat Earth theory is back. What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? In Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that these phenomena share a root cause. We live in a time when the so-called "right to your opinion" is thought to trump our responsibilities. The resulting ethos effectively compromises mental immune systems, allowing "mind parasites" to overrun them. Conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, garden-variety bad ideas: these are all species of mind parasite, and each of them employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems. In fact, some of them compromise cultural immune systems - the things societies do to prevent bad ideas from spreading. Norman shows why all of this is more than mere analogy: minds and cultures really do have immune systems, and they really can break down. Fortunately, they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. He calls for a rigorous science of mental immune health - what he calls "cognitive immunology" - and explains how it could revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking. Hailed as "a feast for thought," Mental Immunity melds cutting-edge work in science and philosophy into an "astonishingly enlightening and productive" solution to the signature problem of our age. A practical guide to spotting and removing bad ideas, a stirring call to transcend our petty tribalisms, and a serious bid to bring humanity to its senses. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Or maybe what its like to get a spot on FOX and Friends, where you can say completely crazy things and the others simply nod their heads.
Then I saw that Anthony Doerr had come out with a new novel (which I haven’t read yet) called “Cloud Cuckoo Land” which has to be about some of the conversations I’ve read on facebook.
But Andy Norman’s project for this work of psychology is a little more serious. He wants to launch a new science to cut down on the number of lousy ideas people use in public discourse and, worse, which people use to develop public policy.
He starts out using the science of immunology as a metaphor for the kind of restorative science he wants largely philosophers to brandish. He talks of “infectious ideas” and “mind-parasites” in much the way we view medical viruses.
If I were a cynic I might treat Norman’s thesis as a subtle means for improving the status of philosophers on campus these days. Or possibly improving their pay scale.
I imagined philosophers running around campus in white lab coats with stethoscopes dangling on their necks. They’ll claim brain parasites as pre-existing conditions for health insurance claims. It could be a great boondoggle for private universities to get public subsidies.
There may even need to be isolation wards for the worst afflicted, something like the mental hospitals of old but for FOX News hosts and freshmen Congressmen.
Material for a great lampoon? For sure.
His diagnosis is largely correct: crazy ideas are over-running the air waves and average people are consuming them like lollipops.
Norman proposes that general education includes a new Socratic method for training better, more critical thinking, and better consideration of the impact ideas have on society. All in all, it’s not such a bad idea.
But I shudder to think we would have to re-train our over-burdened police forces with special training to handle mental outliers. They already have trouble handling schizoid personalities. ( )