Welcome to my monthly book recommendation for July! Every month, I recommend a book that I’ve personally read and find worthwhile enough to recommend to my own readers. In each post, I’ll introduce the book, discuss why I found reading it worthwhile, and the major themes the book touches upon. I won’t include any major spoilers, but I may discuss some of the characters and specific details or locations from within the book.
My recommendation for July 2025 is Steven Pinker’s Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scare, Why It Matters.
Rationality
Available on Amazon
Author: Steven Pinker
Genre: Nonfiction
Description: Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding–and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing?
Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational–cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself. We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we’ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our education, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book–until now.
Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth.
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with Pinker’s customary insight and humor, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower.
My Thoughts
Steven Pinker’s Rationality is an interesting read. It offers a breadth of knowledge across fields of logic, statistics, and game theory, all without any of the tedium or dryness we’ve all experienced reading similar books. Pinker writes in a style that’s engaging and inviting, as if you’re allowing him to take the lead in a relaxing discussion of interesting phenomena. This book certainly doesn’t read like a classroom book, yet it manages to deliver more useful information than most classroom books could hope to aspire – knowledge you can apply to work, hobbies, and daily life.
At odds with conventional wisdom, Pinker advocates the proposition that humans are not inherently irrational, that our susceptibility to biases does not imply that we are irrational by default. Echoing the results of past research conducted with logic puzzles, he demonstrates that the simple actions of rephrasing and reframing confusing problems can significantly improve our chances of solving them correctly. This isn’t limited to logic puzzles or textbook problems. In this modern society, our lives are based on statistics, both in the choices we make, and in the presentation of those choices by the businesses we interact with. The human mind is not naturally adept with thinking statistically, but nonetheless, when met with such a problem, such as whether or not to trust the information provided by a news source, a simple reframing of the context can make all the difference.
Pinker then canvasses the main components of rationality: critical thinking, probabilities, evidence and belief, and game theory, before giving special attention to correlation and causation. He manages to strike a balance between depth and breadth – each of these topics could be the subject of a book, or even series of books, in their own rights. I’ve seen books falter in this balancing act before, either offering more depth than is appropriate for its target audience, or not enough to satisfy them. Rationality handles this perfectly.
I’d consider this book to be an effective blend of theory and practical insight. I’ve always firmly believed that true success, whether it be in your career, hobbies, or personal growth, requires a level of study beyond conventional wisdom. For true success, you must study the underlying structures that our daily lives are built upon. This book can be a useful tool in that pursuit for two reasons: its broad teachings will enable you to learn and evaluate ideas from multiple angles, and its contents itself is a suitable subject for such study, providing knowledge you can immediately leverage for your own personal improvement. Overall, I consider this to be a solid read for anyone looking to improve their own thinking or learn of the mind’s underlying structures in a somewhat informal manner.
