Book cover of The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

Book description

How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Art of Logic in an Illogical World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The author explains the importance of abstraction in logic, demonstrating its three main components: paths made of long chains of logic, packages made of a collection of concepts structured into a new compound unit, and pivots to build bridges to previously disconnected places.

Eugenia Cheng does an excellent job of abstracting principles of logic to better understand challenging real-world societal issues such as affirmative action and cancer screening. I found it quite compelling to understand how and why she came to her positions on various issues, through her axiom that "avoiding false negatives is more important than avoiding false positives."…

From Richard's list on mathematics and life.

What is the connection between Category Theory and the social structures of white privilege? Or between Venn diagrams and U.S. immigration policy? If you are like me you probably never thought there was a connection. But in The Art of Logic in an Illogical World Eugenia Cheng shows otherwise. Because when properly applied, she argues, even seemingly esoteric mathematical fields can reveal the hidden logic in the world around us.

Cheng is a research mathematician at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she believes that mathematics has much to teach us about how to understand the world,…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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