Rebecca Lemov - Böcker

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often cannot recognise it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. In The Instability of Truth, Rebecca Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, exploring the history of brainwashing techniques from those employed against POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behaviour-shaping.Lemov reveals that anyone can fall victim to mind control, especially in our increasingly data-driven world and identifies invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction to create coercion and persuasion in everyday life. Offering lessons learned from mind-control episodes past and present, Lemov equips us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism.

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences - psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others - and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people - Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others - and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a "Cold War rationality." Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality - optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical - in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy.The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a \u201cCold War rationality.\u201d Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy.The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.