100 Books Like The Optimism Bias

The concept of the ‘good ancestor,’ originally coined by physician Jonas Salk, is the focus of Roman Krznaric’s excellent book about our relationship with future generations.

I’ve known Roman for a few years now: he spoke about long-term time on a panel I organised at the Hay Festival a few years ago, and he makes an appearance in my own book on a trip we both made to the House of Lords to watch a debate about future generation policy.

He is a crystal clear thinker and communicator, and I’ve learnt a lot from him. One of the most interesting (of many) ideas in his book is the idea that we are “colonising” the future: treating it as some distant no-man’s land where we can dump environmental degradation, malignant heirlooms, carbon emissions, and so on.

Of course, the future belongs to the people living there: our grandchildren. Roman makes a… show more.

Around the time my co-authors and I finished working on our book, I was browsing a favorite local bookstore and came across Ari Wallach’s little gem of a book, Longpath. While our book is all about the cognitive science of foresight, what I found in Wallach’s was a wealth of wisdom on why and how to use that foresight for good. It is a highly accessible and relatable book, as well as earnest and hopeful. Wallach points out that our current era presents an incredible opportunity to write a new future for our species. What should our telos be? While the book zooms out to the extremely big picture of the far future, Wallach ultimately finds the fulcrum of change in the small, controllable moments of our everyday lives where we have the greatest opportunity to adopt longer-term habits of thought and action.

As someone who hoarded toilet paper weeks before the 2020 shortage, I relate to the frustration of watching history repeat itself (or at least rhyme with itself) because people are often too distracted to focus on planning for looming crises.

Bina Venkataraman gets to the “why” of this often-fatal flaw as she explores the nature of human decision-making. This book provides tangible narratives as a springboard to answer these questions: How can we use wisdom from our ancestors to better inform our personal, professional, and policy decisions? How can we incentivize (or glitter bomb) long-term planning? And how can we see ourselves as future ancestors in order to be better stewards of the planet?

A perfect selection for corporate, government, and non-profit retreats and professional development conferences!  

This is the one book that explains why humans have become poor at understanding the passage of time and how we can change fast to plan for a shared future.

“Living in the age we do, we have never before had such leverage to shape the trajectory of the future, with so little collective recognition of that fact,” writes Richard Fisher. 

Early evolutionary biology was preoccupied with notions of Social Darwinism (the survival of the fittest), but later developments in the field have focused not only on evolving patterns of social cooperation but also on the nature of the human brain itself. The latter is the subject of neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg’s The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World. Goldberg observes that human cerebral evolution has resulted in the development of a complex human brain. Humans possess, by way of their frontal lobes (especially their prefrontal cortex), complex executive functions involving advanced intentionality and decision-making. Goldberg recognizes that emotional areas of the brain interact with its executive functions, but his neuroscientific investigations support my own view that human reason, rightly understood, should supervise human thought and action.

Since journalism school, I have always been drawn to storytelling that tells the truth, but better. Journalism that reads like fiction, that makes you feel something, and makes you think differently. The stories that stick with you and change your perspective on more than just the direct subject. Conversations questioning the self, identity, and the world around us, ultimately in the pursuit of happiness, make me feel alive. 

In university, I studied philosophers like Descartes, Voltaire, Plato, and Machiavelli. Then I fell in love with the classics like The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno. From there, it was Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. Through all of it, a common thread. How do we define humanity?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows explores themes like attention, discipline, cultural commentary, thought process, and emotional clarity. Over the last few decades, we have been experiencing a digital-age shift, and Carr’s writing shares the very human… show more.

My first 3 picks put much of the blame for widespread attention capture on greedy actors engaged in a “race to the bottom of the brainstem” (Tristan Harris, former Google employee, became popular opponent of exploitative big tech). 

Although Carr does not shy from that theme, he seems to put much of the responsibility on our own shoulders: it is we who must resist many temptations of convenience in order to preserve our own cognitive strengths, such as creativity. Otherwise, we become shallow thinkers and reliant on AI even for something as characteristically human as wisdom. 

Carr’s follow-up to this book, The Glass Cage, is also very intriguing, and it offers a little more hope for a humanity that is currently bound up in a web of frightening technological dependency.

In my mind, Carr nails the real threats of AI: a total dumming-down of humanity to a level where we… show more.

I love good research, especially when it’s related through interesting stories. Damasio delivers big insights about how we think and make decisions through a fascinating collection of research findings and stories. He explains the foundations of emotional intelligence and challenges the consistent application of logic! 

It’s a dense read and I hung in there to the end. It rewards with the insight that we remember things by attaching an emotion to information. Meaning that if we don’t have an emotional response to something, we don’t remember it. Schools give tests because fear of a low grade resulting in a dim future makes us remember. We also remember things by attaching love-based emotions. Imagine going to a school dedicated to supporting us in following our curiosity wherever it took us.

In this uniquely structured book, Dan Siegel covers the major elements of interpersonal neurobiology, which is one of the most exciting theoretical constructs currently available. Siegel and I are definitely on the same page in applying complex dynamical systems theory to the understanding of mind/body integration, consciousness, and the essential role of interpersonal relationships in healthy human development.

This book by G. Edelman played an important role in the development of our mathematical MES theory for complex "living" systems. Our specific application of MES to neuro-cognitive systems, named MENS, represents a kind of mathematical translation of Edelman’s book into Category Theory. 

Specifically, leveraging the categorical concept of a 'colimit,' we expand upon Edelman's principle of the "degeneracy of the neural code" by introducing a form of non-isomorphic redundancy termed the Multiplicity Principle (MP), wherein the system admits multifaceted components. Subsequently, we establish a significant result: if an MES adheres to the MP, the system is reliant not on pure reductionism but rather on an "emergentist-reductionism" as defined by the philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge.