Here are just a few of the hundreds of new ideas you’ll stuff in your head while reading You Are Now Less Dumb:
You’ll finally understand why people wait in line to walk into unlocked rooms and how that reveals a universal behavior that slows progress and social change.
You’ll discover the connection between salads, football, and consciousness.
You’ll learn why people who die and come back tend to return with similar stories, and you’ll see how the explanation can help you avoid arguments on the internet.
You’ll see why Bill Clinton, Gerard Butler, and Robert DeNiro all believe in the same magical amulet because they are all equally ignorant in one very silly way that you can easily avoid.
You’ll learn about a scientist’s bizarre experiment that tested what would happen if multiple messiahs lived together for several years and how you can use what he learned to debunk your own delusions.
You’ll learn why the same person’s accent can be irritating in some situations and charming in others and you can use that knowledge to make better hiring choices and improve education.
“You Are Now Less Dumb is ‘a book about self-delusion, but also a celebration of it,’ a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney, with his signature fusion of intelligent irreverence and irreverent intelligence... [explores] such facets of our self-delusion as why we see patterns where there aren’t any, how we often confuse the origin of our emotional states, and more.”
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings