In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise produces errors in many fields, including in medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, forensic science, child protection, creative strategy, performance review and hiring. And although noise can be found wherever people are making judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike commonly ignore its impact, at great cost.

Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. Their time at Amazon covered a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services to life. Through their wealth of experience they offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated and proven to be repeatable, scalable and adaptable.  

With the publication of The Everything Store in 2013, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone revealed how the unlikely Seattle start-up Amazon became an unexpected king of ecommerce. Since then, its founder has led Amazon to explosive growth in both size and wealth. In Amazon Unbound, Stone offers the must-listen follow-up, detailing the seismic changes that have taken place at Amazon over the past decade as it became one of the most powerful and feared companies in the global economy, led by one of the most powerful and feared leaders in business.

When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side” - in our politics, at work, or at home - it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what “high conflict” does. In a lively audio production with sound clips from individuals and situations she discusses in the book, New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict - and how they break free. 

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole - and appear to assess black and white defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And autonomous vehicles on our streets can injure or kill.

Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump's improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit and concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence. 

What does it actually mean to be rational? Not Hollywood-style "rational", where you forsake all human feeling to embrace Cold Hard Logic, but where you make good decisions, even when it's hard; where you reason well, even in the face of massive uncertainty; where you recognize and make full use of your fuzzy intuitions and emotions, rather than trying to discard them. In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.

Insight and empathy spring from the clash of different perspectives. In a world where it's easier than ever for people to share their opinions, we should be reaping the benefits of diverse views. Instead, we too often find ourselves mired in hostility or - worse - avoiding disagreement altogether. Ian Leslie argues that this is because most of us never learn how to air our differences in a way that leads to progress.

For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses map-like structures to build a model of the world - not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. 

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In recent months, the pandemic has forced us all to reevaluate our assumptions about health and safety and multiple acts of police brutality have challenged most of us to reconsider our responsibility for fighting racism. Yet in our daily lives, too many of us still favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.

Award-winning Wharton professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the study of behaviour change. An engineer by training, she approaches all challenges as problems to be solved and, with this mindset, has drilled into the roadblocks that prevent us from achieving our goals and breaking unwanted behaviours. The key to lasting change, she argues, is not to set ever more audacious goals or to foster good habits but to get your strategy right.

“An exceptional book” (Helen Fisher) by a leading evolutionary psychologist and sex researcher that lays out a new theory of sexual conflict, exposing the roots of the dangerous dynamics that underpin men’s predatory behavior - and what can be done to address it. 

In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.

Medicine, education, psychology, health, parenting - wherever it really matters, we look to science for advice. Science Fictions reveals the disturbing flaws that undermine our understanding of all of these fields and more.