Third Millennium Thinking

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.    John Campbell is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.   Robert MacCoun is a social psychologist, a professor of law at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He received the 2019 James McKeen Cattell Award for lifetime achievement from the Association for Psychological Science.

Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, how to use scientists’ tricks of the trade to make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems in age of uncertainty and overwhelming information.   In our deluge of information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. How do we make health decisions in the face of conflicting medical advice? Does the research cited in that article even show what the authors claim? How can we navigate the next Thanksgiving discussion with our in-laws, who follow completely different experts on the topic of climate change?   In Third Millennium Thinking, a physicist, a psychologist, and a philosopher introduce readers to the tools and frameworks that scientists have developed to keep from fooling themselves, to understand the world, and to make decisions. We can all borrow these trust-building techniques to tackle problems both big and small.   Readers will learn: