Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Importance of Being Educable...

  Leslie Valiant

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  If we hope to share our planet successfully with one another and the AI systems we are creating, we must reflect on who we are, how we got here, and where we are heading. The Importance of Being Educable puts forward a provocative new exploration of the extraordinary facility of humans to absorb and apply knowledge. The remarkable "educability" of the human brain can be understood as an information processing ability. It sets our species apart, enables the civilization we have, and gives us the power and potential to set our planet on a steady course. While we can readily absorb systems of thought about worlds of experience beyond our own, we struggle to judge correctly what information we should trust. 
   
   
   
  In this visionary book, Leslie Valiant argues that understanding the nature of our own educability is crucial to safeguarding our future. After breaking down how we process information to learn and apply knowledge, and drawing comparisons with other animals and AI systems, he explains why education should be humankind's central preoccupation. 
   
   
   
  Will the unique capability that has been so foundational to our achievements and civilization continue to drive our progress, or will we fall victim to our vulnerabilities? If we want to protect our collective future, we must better understand and prioritize the importance of being educable.

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  Short History of Scotland

  Andrew Lang

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  A Short History of Scotland is a consise introduction to the history of Scotland from Roman times to the last Jacobite rebellion, written by the author of a much longer Scottish history. (Summary by Sibella Denton.)

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  A Life In Letters

  Simone Weil, Annette Devaux,...

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  Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays. 
   
   
   
  The first complete collection of Weil's missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. 
   
   
   
  A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil's thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil's letters to her general body of writing.

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  Think Like a Freak - The Authors...

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

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  The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. 
  Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally—to think, that is, like a Freak. 
  Levitt and Dubner offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems, whether your interest lies in minor lifehacks or major global reforms. As always, no topic is off-limits. They range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain. Along the way, you’ll learn the secrets of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, and why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they’re from Nigeria. 
  Some of the steps toward thinking like a Freak:  First, put away your moral compass—because it’s hard to see a problem clearly if you’ve already decided what to do about it.  Learn to say “I don’t know”—for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.  Think like a child—because you’ll come up with better ideas and ask better questions.  Take a master class in incentives—because for better or worse, incentives rule our world.  Learn to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded—because being right is rarely enough to carry the day.  Learn to appreciate the upside of quitting—because you can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud. 
  Levitt and Dubner plainly see the world like no one else. Now you can too. Never before have such iconoclastic thinkers been so revealing—and so much fun to read.

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  The Spanish Influenza Of 1918

  Mike Parson

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  The 1918 Influenza Pandemic moved worldwide in three waves, infecting up to 500 million people and causing over 40 million deaths. Several things tended to be present in areas that ended the pandemic with lower mortality rates than average. These include low rates of poverty, widespread access to healthcare, well-funded and general public health measures, and well-managed record keeping. Areas that ended the pandemic with high mortality rates tended to lack the above – they had high rates of poverty, limited access to healthcare, public health measures were unfunded or ineffective, and recordkeeping and communication were unreliable or unclear. It is essential to learn from the success and mistakes of nations passed so that we as a planet are better prepared for any pandemics that should arise in the future. Preparing involves high vaccination rates, fighting drug-resistant pathogens, and working to lower global poverty.

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  Journey of Insight Meditation -...

  Eric Lerner

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  This is an audiobook of the classic title Journey of Insight Meditation by Eric Lerner, narrated by Jonathan Nelson.
   
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  "I set out to study and practice Vipassana meditation in India fifty years ago. Then, as now, I characterized myself as both a spiritual seeker and a writer. During the six months that I sojourned in meditation centers and monasteries, observing the strict rules of retreat, I nevertheless spent several hours a day feverishly filling notebooks by lamplight with tightly packed script legible only to me, recording my internal experiences.
   
  I wanted to tell a story, because I am by nature a story teller, but on my return to America I was a bit disconcerted to find that my detailed accounts read like data recorded by a naturalist hidden in the bush observing the behavior of a strange creature in the wild, information that would have little interest to anyone except an extreme specialist in the field.
   
  Up until then my unpublished works were lightly fictionalized autobiographical accounts of my young life, but fiction wouldn’t be accurate enough to tell this tale. Instead, I created a protagonist, a bit of a hero, who was both me and not me, Eric Lerner. I re-created the external world of people and teachers and places he’d encountered, as well as ideas and beliefs adopted and discarded. In other words, a setting and a plot. All of it was real, or real enough, the product of memory and interpretation, a new veracity. A memoir."
   
  
   
  —Eric LernerItaly, March 2023

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