How Dumb Can You Get PDF Download

Author: Kate Kenyon
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780590405003
Category : Schools
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Tracey advises Nora, the star student in shop class, to play dumb to keep Brad interested

Author: Shane Parrish
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593719972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Author: Mats Alvesson
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782832025
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Functional stupidity can be catastrophic. It can cause organisational collapse, financial meltdown and technical disaster. And there are countless, more everyday examples of organisations accepting the dubious, the absurd and the downright idiotic, from unsustainable management fads to the cult of leadership or an over-reliance on brand and image. And yet a dose of stupidity can be useful and produce good, short-term results: it can nurture harmony, encourage people to get on with the job and drive success. This is the stupidity paradox. The Stupidity Paradox tackles head-on the pros and cons of functional stupidity. You'll discover what makes a workplace mindless, why being stupid might be a good thing in the short term but a disaster in the longer term, and how to make your workplace a little less stupid by challenging thoughtless conformity. It shows how harmony and action in the workplace can be balanced with a culture of questioning and challenge. The book is a wake-up call for smart organisations and smarter people. It encourages us to use our intelligence fully for the sake of personal satisfaction, organisational success and the flourishing of society as a whole.

Author: C. John Sommerville
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 083087559X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
We who live at the end of the twentieth century are better informed--and more quickly informed--than any people in history. So why do we also seem more confused, divided and foolish than ever before? Some pundits criticize the news media for political bias. Other analysts worry that up-to-the-minute news reports on radio and television oversimplify complex realities. Still more critics point out that today's reporters can't possibly be experts on the wide variety of subjects they cover. Historian C. John Sommerville thinks the problem with news is more basic. Focusing his critique on the news at its best, he concludes that even at its best it is beyond repair. Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community. This eye-opening book is for everyone dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news really informs them about and connects them with the real world. Read it and you may never again know the tyranny of the daily newspaper or the nightly news broadcast.

Author: Carlo M. Cipolla
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385546483
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
"A masterly book" —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan "A classic" —Simon Kuper, Financial Times An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar. It is human stupidity. Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, created this vitally important book in order to detect and neutralize its threat. Both hilarious and dead serious, it will leave you better equipped to confront political realities, unreasonable colleagues, or your next dinner with your in-laws. The Laws: 1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us. 2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves. 4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Author: Robert J. Sternberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300101706
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of smart individuals--from presidents to prosecutors to professors--is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives? This book is the first devoted to investigating what the most current psychological research can tell us about stupidity in everyday life. The contributors to the volume, renowned scholars in various areas of human intelligence, present fascinating examples of people messing up their lives, and they offer insights into the reasons for such behavior. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss: - The nature and theory of stupidity - How stupidity contributes to stupid behavior - Whether stupidity is measurable While many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid focuses on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences.

Author: David McRaney
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101621788
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart shares more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking, and gives readers a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains David McRaney’s first book, You Are Not So Smart, evolved from his wildly popular blog of the same name. A mix of popular psychology and trivia, McRaney’s insights have struck a chord with thousands, and his blog--and now podcasts and videos--have become an Internet phenomenon. Like You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality--except we’re not. But that’s okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of fifteen more ways we fool ourselves every day, including: The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater affect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us) Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don’t enjoy just to make the time or money already invested “worth it”) Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality) McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and how to avoid falling for our own lies. This smart and highly entertaining book will be wowing readers for years to come.

Author: Traci Fenton
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1953295495
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Discover the leadership strategy for unlocking your team’s greatness. Whether it shows up as stress, top-down leadership styles, drama, or uncertainty, fear kills good decision-making, dampens morale, lowers employee engagement, and hurts bottom-line growth. The good news is that there’s an antidote: Freedom at Work. In this groundbreaking book, Traci Fenton brings together decades of original research, based on her team’s work with hundreds of top companies around the world, such as The WD-40 Company, Mindvalley, DaVita, Menlo Innovations, Zappos, HCL Technologies, and more, revealing the proven pathway to leadership success. This powerful strategy will benefit any leader at any level in any type of organization, from entrepreneurs to mid-level managers to the C-suite. Freedom at Work is based on three key pillars: • Freedom-Centered Mindset: Break through limitations, make better decisions, and act with clarity and confidence • Freedom-Centered Leadership: Lead yourself and others from a place of freedom rather than fear • Freedom-Centered Design: Develop a world-class culture based on the 10 Principles of Organizational Democracy Freedom at Work is a revolutionary guide that will help make any organization high-performing and highly profitable, while creating a culture people love. This book will help passionate leaders weave freedom and democracy into our global tapestry through the way they run their teams and organizations—ultimately transforming our world for the better.

Author: Bert Whitehead
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 9781402766893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
For many of us, planning our own financial future presents pitfalls at every turn, because the truth is, when it comes to money, we are not always rational. Now you can take control of your economic life with confidence. Bert Whitehead, one of the top money-management advisors in America, gives you all the information you need to manage your wealth wisely by relying on your strongest asset-yourself. Book jacket.

Author: Mark Bauerlein
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440636893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings. The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture. For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. But at the dawn of the digital age, many thought they saw an answer: the internet, email, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their knowledge and understanding of technology to set themselves apart as the vanguards of this new digital era. That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more aware, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, most young people in the United States do not read literature, visit museums, or vote. They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount basic American history, name their local political representatives, or locate Iraq or Israel on a map. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American culture and democracy. Over the last few decades, how we view adolescence itself has changed, growing from a pitstop on the road to adulthood to its own space in society, wholly separate from adult life. This change in adolescent culture has gone hand in hand with an insidious infantilization of our culture at large; as adolescents continue to disengage from the adult world, they have built their own, acquiring more spending money, steering classrooms and culture towards their own needs and interests, and now using the technology once promoted as the greatest hope for their futures to indulge in diversions, from MySpace to multiplayer video games, 24/7. Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up? Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, The Dumbest Generation presents a portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies. The Dumbest Generation pulls no punches as it reveals the true cost of the digital age—and our last chance to fix it.