Daniel
Unlike many books, this is a book that I actually feel I can make practical use of. That's my favorite type of book. Another search book is Robert Cialdini's influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. If you know more about that type of book, then feel free to recommend them to me.
Another point of delight is that Ariely is a funny author. It's a subtle humor, one that I greatly enjoyed.
the let them theory is very brief. I think she could tie in a lot more to psychology and philosophy and actual studies on the mind, instead this is filled with anecdotal evidence and feels like, for the lack of a better term, word vomit. She babbles endlessly and gives far far far too many examples for simple ideas than she ought to, just to fill the pages.
I have a few core objections to logotherapy that come directly from how Frankl structures his system. My first problem is with his basic categories. He lists achievement, experience, and suffering as three separate sources of meaning, but experience is the larger category that already includes achievement and suffering. So his triad is logically flawed. It treats a broad class and two of its own subclasses as if they were equals.
My second objection is that he never defines what he means by “experience.” If he means all lived moments, then it makes no sense to call experience one path among others. If he means something narrower, like encounters with beauty or love, he doesn't say so. That imprecision weakens the entire structure.
My third issue is with how he elevates suffering. Frankl treats unavoidable suffering as a privileged path to meaning, but he never explains why suffering should carry more meaning than any other kind of lived situation. It feels like a moral preference, not a justified philosophical claim.
My fourth objection is that logotherapy assumes meaning exists outside of me, as something I must discover or fulfill. Frankl speaks as if life presents tasks or questions I am responsible for answering. This assumes an external, objective structure of meaning without arguing for it.
My fifth problem is his use of “values.” He bases meaning on values but never clarifies what those values actually are or where they come from. Without a clear account of values, the whole system rests on an undefined idea.
Last, I think logotherapy's emotional and therapeutic strength can disguise its conceptual looseness. It works well as a motivational framework, but when I look at it philosophically, the category structure and the assumptions underneath it don't hold together.
A lot of interesting information about cognitive biases and how the brain works when thinking. How we have an intuitive quick process capacity as a well as a lazy more demanding brain. It's interesting that he mentions libertarianism at the end of the book. I'm not quite sure he is putting together one of the major concerns of libertarians which is that the actors in the State don't always have the best in mind for the people.
The series was quite disconnected until the end. Declan doesn't seem to have any real connection with Hatu besides meeting and the nature of his skills in battle (time slowing down) isn't explained unless I missed it. Throwing in an additional dreadlord at the end combined with the pride lords just didn't really jive for me. Donte returning from the sisters of the deep with intent to kill just fizzled out. Seems like a buildup for betrayal could have been used but nothing happened with it at all. All in all I'm disappointed with this conclusion of the series
really interesting book. Yuval is clearly weak on economics and he got Capitalism quite a bit wrong, but other than that I really enjoyed it.
Capitalism is an economic system, yet he compares it to communism which is a political AND an economic system. Capitalism per say is not to blame for much slavery, like he seems to do, that is up to the political and moral-cultural systems that were present at the time.
The critique often made by historians and social scientists, including Yuval Noah Harari, is that certain aspects of early capitalist economies utilized, perpetuated, or were complicit in systems of slavery, particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantations.
This critique can be applied to the wheel just as much as capitalism. It's a nonsensical argument. The moral and ethical implications of a tool or system are largely determined by the ways in which they are employed by humans, rather than inherent characteristics of the tools or systems themselves.
It's easy to rate the teachings laid forward in this book as opposed to the book itself. Since this is the first book I'm reading on the topic. it's hard for me to separate the two. The book has some personal anecdotes which I didn't really find particularly interesting. He draws some references from other books, but none of them are very compelling. It would be more interesting to me if the book had some deeper parallels to other works and ideas. I recognized ideas from Buddhism, Stoicism, Adlerian psychology, Tao, etc, but I think the book failed to connect them.
So I feel the book was written by someone who's somewhat of a layman, and hence the rating 3 stars. To his credit, he claims nothing else at the outset, but that doesn't change my rating.