The World's Best Book Summaries
What is a global society? How did our various societies merge into one, global culture? A global society is a society in which practices and beliefs are similar across the world. Increasing communication throughout the world leads to a more global society. We’ll cover the history of how individual societies merged to create a global society.
What are the basic events in the history of humankind? What revolutions characterized the cognitive and cultural evolution of homo sapiens? The history of humankind is punctuated by four major revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. These revolutions changed the history of humankind in ways both positive and negative. We’ll look at each revolution and how it dramatically redirected the course of human history, but to understand these upheavals, we need to go back to a time when Homo sapiens was just one of multiple human species (and not a very distinguished
Gender is a social construct. This is confusing because it has its basis in biology. When it comes to gender, what’s the relationship between societal norms and biology? Gender is a social construct because, while it’s related to your sex, it’s not based on your biology. It’s influenced by how you fit (or choose to fit) the “man” or “woman” mold created by your particular culture’s myths about men and women. We’ll cover the difference between “gender” and “sex” and look at how these distinctions have played out over the history of humanity.
What are the major events in the cultural evolution of man? How did these events shape our cultures today? The cultural evolution of man has been shaped by changes in the ways we think, our language, and the ways by which we relate to each other. Language, especially, has had a powerful role in creating the global culture we recognize today. We’ll cover the events of man’s cultural evolution and how language brought people together to create a global society.
In the future, intelligent design could replace natural selection through biological engineering. What is biological engineering? Biological engineering is when scientists intervene with an organism’s biology to change its physical, behavioral, or emotional characteristics. For these reasons, biological engineering projects are often controversial. We’ll cover examples of biological engineering that’s already happing and biological engineering plans for the future. We’ll also look at other ways intelligent design could replace natural selection.
What does the future of the human race hold? Will we remain the same race, Homo sapiens, that we are now? In the future of the human race, intelligent design could replace natural selection in one of two ways (or a combination of the two): cyborg engineering and biological engineering. We’ll cover what these are and what new questions they’ll introduce to the future human race.
What was the Cognitive Revolution in Sapiens? How did it allow our species to survive, while other human species, such as Neanderthals, disappeared? The Cognitive Revolution was the moment in human history when our ancestors developed three new abilities: flexible language, communication about 3rd parties, and collective fictions. The Cognitive Revolution allowed homo sapiens to develop the societies that characterize the species today. We’ll cover the three aspects of the Cognitive Revolution as described in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens and expand upon the above Cognitive Revolution definition.
What was the process of the evolution of human intelligence? How did the evolution of the human brain occur in tandem with the evolution of human intelligence? The evolution of human intelligence involved an increased brain size and the development of three skills: the creation of flexible language, communication about 3rd parties, and collective fictions. This evolution gave humans a leg-up in the animal world. We’ll cover the characteristics of the evolution of human intelligence and how that evolution shaped the modern world.
What is outcome bias? How does it manifest in your everyday life, and how can you avoid it? Outcome bias is the tendency to evaluate the quality of a decision when the outcome is already known. People who succeeded are assumed to have made better decisions than people who failed. We’ll look at outcome bias examples and why we’re so vulnerable to outcome bias.
The movie The Big Short, starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt, among others, is based on the 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. Do you know the real story behind the movie? The Big Short explores the origins of and fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis through the eyes of a handful of eccentric and oddball investors who saw that the U.S. housing market—and, by extension, the entire financial system—was built on a foundation of sand.