Keith E. Stanovich

Stanovich's book is based around the presumption that our body is built by replicators and our minds are flooded with them (genes and memes respectively) and that these replicators don't always necessarilly have our best interests at heart. He argues for what he calls a "program of cognitive reform" that places man, not his genes or memes, at the center stage. He argues that we need to rationally analyze our thoughts and motivations to see which fall in line with what we truly want out of show more life, and which are either created by our genes or motivated by our memes. He argues for epistemic rationality so that humans no longer fall prey to the replicators that would so willingly throw them away. Stanovich convincingly lays out the challenges facing humanity from within and makes clear that man is not so rational or enlightened as we might like. show less

Why, oh lord, why, does every popular science book repeat over and over again the same two concepts, filling well over 200 pages with slightly different wordings of the same thing?

It happens here, too: the (interesting) stuff could have been comfily put in 50/70 pages, making it more readable.

Anyway, it seemed to me a good - although somewhat vague - introduction.

3.5 stars

Much better than I expected. Its arguments didn't seem to get confused by its own short-hand (as is so often the case).

IQ tests are reliable measures of intellectual ability, but intelligence is only one aspect of the cognitive mind; the other aspect is rationality, which is only weakly correlated with intelligence and is not adequately measured by intelligence tests.