I started this project in response to my adjunct faculty teaching experience at UNLV and our community college, along with my experience during that time as a textbook manuscript reviewer for Allyn & Bacon/Longman. I quickly found I had to write a lot of my own ancillary classroom material to "fill in the blanks" and to provide relevant topical material that went beyond the text and standard syllabus. As a manuscript reviewer, it became evident in short order that these professor/authors were all mainly writing to impress each other -- such was/is the imperative of passing "peer review." Whether the material would be of interest or utility to students was a secondary concern.
I think I can add something new, a different and interesting and useful perspective. We shall see.
The hardcopy grist of my research readings, in no particular order (other than updated as accrued over time):
- You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself
- Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists
- More Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues
- Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
- Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics
- Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking
- On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Introduction to logic
- Ethical Argument: Critical Thinking in Ethics
- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
- Six Thinking Hats: An essential approach to business management
- Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life
- Critical Thinking: An Introduction
- Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate
- Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic
- On Bullshit
- On Truth
- Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds
- How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
- Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
- Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
- How Doctors Think
- Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
- The Flight from Science and Reason
- Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
- Critical thinking: The analysis of arguments
- The psychology of law: Integrations and applications
- Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science In The Courtroom
- Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills
- Einstein: His Life and Universe
- Foundations of Critical Thinking
- Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
- Choices, Values, and Frames
- Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
- The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work
- Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works
- Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking
- Critical Thinking
- A Civil Tongue
- Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
- The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making
- The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
- How to Argue & Win Every Time
- The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
- Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
- Envisioning Information
- Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Winning Every Time: How to Use the Skills of a Lawyer in the Trials of Your Life
- The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion
- Sway: The irrestistible pull of irrational behavior
- How We Decide
- Judgment and Decision Making: psychological perspectives
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
- Stat Spotting: a field guide to identifying dubious data
- Predictably Irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions
- Switch: how to change things when change is hard
- Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
- Being Wrong: adventures in the margin of error (Wow, what a find this was!)
- The Upside of Irrationality
- On Second Thought
- Sleights of Mind
- The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
- Why Do Humans Reason?
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Medicine in Denial
I would ask my students, "If, when it's all said and done, your evidence and logic are rock-solid, but you change no minds, what have you truly accomplished? We have more issues to resolve constructively than we have hours in the day. So, we do well to become persuasive communicators, but ones that can effectively sell the TRUTH."
I have long been an avid student of cognition, with special interests in persuasion psychology (e.g., thinking like advertisers and trial lawyers), and the cognitive attributes and liabilities of "expertise" (e.g., thinking like doctors or scientists).
I hope I can add value to the popular and undergrad literature. I will do my best.
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