They demonstrate that voters even those who are well informed and politically engaged mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. "Democracy for Realists" provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government."

    What is going on? Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals. Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?  This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?  By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?  In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

    This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success. But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? To answer these questions, Selfie by Will Storr takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now. It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately – our self.

    But if you have already engaged with effective altruism, there should be some new insights amongst the familiar ideas. The pieces are a mix of essays and adaptations of conference talks. We’ve tried to put them in an order that makes sense. Together we think they cover some of the key ideas in the effective altruism community.Why a new edition?The first edition of the EA Handbook is now 3 years old. As a community, we’ve changed a lot in those three years, and learnt a lot. In fact, comparing the new handbook with the old is a good way to get a sense of just how much intellectual progress we’ve made.After consulting with Ryan Carey, the editor of the old handbook, we agreed it was time for something new, and for a slightly more polished design. Stefan Schubert and I compiled a list of talks and articles, and the authors were gracious enough to give us permission. With the help of a small army of transcribers and copy-editors, and Laura Pomarius’ design skills, we brought it together. What next?We hope that this becomes a reference point for people who are new to effective altruism, and a summary that local groups can share with their members. We are not currently planning to make a physical version of the EA Handbook: we think that the articles and design are high quality for an online pdf. However, we worry that it might damage the brand of effective altruism to distribute or sell physical copies of a resource which remains only a collection of articles and talks, rather than a polished book.http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1np/...

    Season 1, comprising 20 essays totaling approximately 30,000 words, is written by Venkatesh Rao and illustrated by Grace Witherell. This inaugural season is an in-depth exploration of Marc Andreessen’s observation that “software is eating the world.”

    Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light on conditions ranging from diabetes and allergies to cystic fibrosis, migraines, and male infertility. With inimitable wit and a clear, fresh voice, award-winning researcher Frances Ashcroft weaves together compelling real-life stories with the latest scientific findings, giving us a spectacular account of the body electric.

    You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists see things differently, from Newton to Einstein to today’s quantum theorists. For them, time isn’t real. You may think you experience time passing, but they say it’s just an illusion.Lee Smolin, author of the controversial bestseller The Trouble with Physics, argues this limited notion of time is holding physics back. It’s time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics.What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilties. There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with major implications for physics and beyond—from climate change to the economic crisis. Smolin explains in lively and lucid prose how the true nature of time impacts our world.

    But Plato’s role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy. But it is primarily the fate of philosophy that concerns her. Is the discipline no more than a way of biding our time until the scientists arrive on the scene? Have they already arrived? Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance? Plato at the Googleplex is Goldstein’s startling investigation of these conundra. She interweaves her narrative with Plato’s own choice for bringing ideas to life—the dialogue. Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion?  How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato’s brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher’s depth and a novelist’s imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world.(With black-and-white photographs throughout.)

    Nothing you experience would be possible without the intricate power of your senses. But how much about them do you really know?Your ability to sense and perceive the world around you is so richly detailed and accurate as to be miraculous. No tool in the entire universe of scientific exploration can come close to matching the ability of your brain to use information sensed by your eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose to produce a rich sensory experience in just milliseconds.In recent years, neurobiologists and other scientists have uncovered new insights into how your senses work and the amazingly complex and fascinating things they can do. And now you can share in what they've discovered-through this intriguing series of 24 lectures from an award-winning teacher.Knowing how your senses work and the ways they shape how you see, interact with, and understand your life will help you think more critically about everything you sense and perceive, strengthen your appreciation of the senses that make this possible, prepare you to be an active consumer of new scientific evidence on how our senses work, and much more.With Professor Vishton as your guide, you'll. consider each of your senses from multiple perspectives:Explore how your brain processes different sensory informationConsider how your senses work together and within the context of the environment around youdiscover how your senses connect you to the world and other people.Using both cutting-edge research and simple experiments, tests, and demonstrations to hone your understanding, he has created a world-class learning experience that will change the way you think about your senses.

    Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

    If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us.In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.Ambitious, provocative, and entertaining, The Enigma of Reason will spark debate among psychologists and philosophers, and make many reasonable people rethink their own thinking.

    This book brings them all together for the first time. It systematically presents what the various Stoic philosophers said on every important topic, accompanied by an eloquent commentary that is clear and concise. The result is a set of philosophy lessons for everyone - the most valuable wisdom of ages past made available for our times, and for all time.

    

    Admittedly, computers now play chess at the grandmaster level, but do they understand the game as we do? Can a computer eventually do everything a human mind can do? In this absorbing and frequently contentious book, Roger Penrose--eminent physicist and winner, with Stephen Hawking, of the prestigious Wolf prize--puts forward his view that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine. Penrose examines what physics and mathematics can tell us about how the mind works, what they can't, and what we need to know to understand the physical processes of consciousness. He is among a growing number of physicists who think Einstein wasn't being stubborn when he said his little finger told him that quantum mechanics is incomplete, and he concludes that laws even deeper than quantum mechanics are essential for the operation of a mind. To support this contention, Penrose takes the reader on a dazzling tour that covers such topics as complex numbers, Turing machines, complexity theory, quantum mechanics, formal systems, Godel undecidability, phase spaces, Hilbert spaces, black holes, white holes, Hawking radiation, entropy, quasicrystals, the structure of the brain, and scores of other subjects. The Emperor's New Mind will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in modern physics and its relation to philosophical issues, as well as to physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and those on either side of the AI debate.

    While it’seasy to see that stress affects health and well-being, or that your blood pressure rises when you’re angry, cutting-edge research shows that the mind-body connection goes much further.Numerous studies on the brain’s interaction with the body demonstrate that health is directly affected by our social environments, socioeconomic status, culture, behaviors, relationships, psychological states, and habits of mind, among many factors. Current mind-body science reveals facts such as these: As few as eight weeks of mindfulness meditation can meaningfully boost your immune system. Extreme stress and low social support increase the risk of breast cancer by a factor of 9. Contact with nature is correlated with numerous positive health outcomes, including improved attention for children, reduced stress, and enhanced work performance. Chronic hostility portends calcification of the coronary arteries, even in young people. Expressive writing by patients is correlated with improved outcomes for both asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.Mind-body medicine—working in tandem with traditional medical practice—makes use of a large spectrum of psychological, physical, and behavioral treatments, drawn from many disciplines, in an approach to health care that aims to treat the whole person. It provides highly effective resources for preventing and treating a wide range of medical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, stress, cancer, and depression—as well as for fostering the ultimate goals of health care: truly optimal and lasting physical health, and emotional and psychological well-being.A knowledge of this exciting field offers you critical understanding of the state of the art of health care and a significant new direction in medicine. But beyond valuable knowledge, a grounding in mind-body medicine gives you numerous practical, empowering tools for your own health care, as well as that of your family—tools that can make a profound difference for healthful, vibrant living.In Mind-Body Medicine: The New Science of Optimal Health, you’ll study this subject in compelling depth, with the expert guidance of Professor Jason M. Satterfield of the University of California, San Francisco. These 36 eye-opening lectures offer you a comprehensive overview of the field, providing rigorous answers to the questions of what makes us sick, what makes us well, and what we can do about it.You’ll look closely at the anatomical and biological systems through which what is “outside” in the environment gets “inside” to affect our minds and bodies. You’ll also examine recent research on subjects ranging from the impact our emotions and psychology have on health to the crucial roles that social, cultural, and behavioral factors play. And you’ll learn about effective mind-body treatments for numerous common medical conditions and diseases.Finally, you’ll finish the course with a toolbox of ideas and interventions for your personal wellness goals, empowering you to partner more effectively with your medical providers and maximize your own health.A Remarkable New Context for Health Care Professor Satterfield, a highly respected professor of clinical medicine and a specialist on the intersection of psychological factors and physical health, brings to the table his deep knowledge of mind-body science and extensive clinical experience in its application.In the course’s opening, he introduces you to the model of “biopsychosocial medicine,” which looks at the relationship between biological, psychological, and social factors in health.In studying how the biopsychosocial model is applied in modern medicine, you delve into these core subject areas:Biological pathways:You first investigate the anatomy and physiology of four biological systems through which the “outside” gets “in.” By reviewing a detailed study of the autonomic nervous system and the neuroendocrine system, discover how the brain activates the body’s two stress-response systems, and how these systems crucially affect health and well-being. Learn also about the physiology of immune function and the effects of stress on immune response and healing. Study the mechanisms of genetics as well as fascinating research indicating that your behavior can alter your genetic material, for better or worse—changes that can be passed on to future generations.Psychological factors in health: In the course of nine lectures, you look in depth at the critical ways in which psychology affects the body. Learn how negative emotional states such as anger and hostility can influence both the onset and progression of disease, and how positive emotions aid substantially in healing and wellness. Study how cognition—the ways in which we think and process our experiences—affects emotional states and behavior. Drawing from cognitive and other behavioral therapies, learn effective techniques for reshaping thinking, emotions, and behavior. Review evidence that certain personality types may be predisposed to conditions such as cardiovascular disease and depression, and learn how we can compensate for risk-carrying personality traits by working with cognitions and emotions. Investigate the neuroscience of behavior and the important effects of our behaviors on both disease and disease prevention. Look at stress as an integration of biological, cognitive, and social factors, and see how we can approach stress response and coping as a developmental skill. Social and ecological factors: You also study the important effects on health of factors such as culture, identity, socioeconomic status, social support, communities, and public health policy. Examine the studied correlations of income to health, education level to longevity, and ethnicity to susceptibility to disease, and consider how we can use this knowledge to benefit both individual and public health. Review research linking social support to health in many medical conditions, such as heart disease, cancer, and pregnancy; and do a detailed assessment to evaluate and strengthen your own social support network. Investigate how spiritual affiliations and practices have distinct physical benefits, such as reducing blood pressure, cortisol, and inflammation; improving lipid profiles and cardiovascular health; and extending life expectancy. Assess how physical environments affect health, how national and local culture impacts health-related behaviors, and how public initiatives can create healthier behaviors, environments, and communities.Tools and Strategies for Optimal WellnessBuilding on the biopsychosocial model, you study mind-body treatments for common conditions such as cardiovascular disease, stress, cancer, obesity, chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.Here, you learn about specific practices and interventions that you can use in your own health care program, such as these. Stress management: For both personal and occupational stress, learn about a spectrum of stress management approaches, from cognitive restructuring and perspective shifting to meditation, breathing techniques, relaxation training, and the learnable skill of resilience. Strategies for successful behavior change: With reference to concerns such as lifestyle change, weight management, and disease prevention, study the leading models of effective behavior change, as well as specific approaches such as the strategies of motivational interviewing, the four key elements of change, and the internal skills of self-regulation. Heart disease—prevention and treatment: Survey psychosocial interventions for heart disease, including a range of behavior change approaches, stress and emotion management, somatic quieting, social connection, and dramatic evidence that cardiac disease can be reversed through lifestyle change. Treatment of pain: Study mind-body factors in pain experience, and learn about treatments including cognitive and behavior change, acupuncture, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and biofeedback. Fatigue, headaches, insomnia: Investigate the variety of medical conditions that show no clear organic cause, such as chronic fatigue, tension headaches, and sleep disorders; and review effective psychological, physical, and behavioral approaches to treatment.Professor Satterfield’s teaching combines an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, clear and accessible explanations of the science involved, and a highly compassionate approach to patient care. He enriches the lectures with stories and case studies of patients in treatment for stress, heart conditions, insomnia, trauma, and other health challenges, showing you what mind-body medicine looks like in clinical practice and how you can integrate its lessons into your health program and daily life.With the knowledge and tools you’ll learn in Mind-Body Medicine: The New Science of Optimal Health, you can begin your own biopsychosocial assessment, identify your strengths and challenges in partnership with your medical providers, and take authentic steps toward your fullest physical and mental wellness.