I like the way they broke down the automatic responses from the thought out responses. This ties in really well with The Power of Habit and the concept of Mindfulness in Buddhism. The habit is the automatic response while mindfulness is full consciousness. They go into a lot of detail and focus really on the same concepts as Decision Analysis. I really enjoyed the book, and might go back for a second listen. I wasn’t particularly surprised by anything in it since I’d read similar books and take the classes on Decision Analysis.
I never really thought about how terrible some of the things the people of God did before. I’d heard some jokes about it before but listening to these two books (part 1) of the Bible audiobook bring it out. Some of the terrible things are:
Giving away your wife so that you can get into the community, but telling everyone that she is your sister, then waiting for God to get angry and threaten to destroy the other person for their iniquity even when they didn’t know anything about it and taking a lot of their property as a reverse dowry of sorts. After all of this you go to another city and do it all over again. And then your descendant does it as well. The excuse given is that you were afraid they would kill you to steal your wife.
After one of the daughters of your people has pre-marital relations with boy from another group you demand that him and all of his people circumcise themselves and tell them that they can then marry your women. When they are all in huge pain from circumcising themselves you kill them all.
God sets a plague upon someone because they aren’t doing what God wants. God makes them not change their mind so that God can show his power, and sets another plague on the person. God then does this 4 more times before allowing the person to change their mind. God them decides that the person should change back so God can have him destroyed.
God makes a people unable to convert so that they can be destroyed for not believing.
God makes new life, then when it hasn’t fully met it’s potential, he decides to remove it all from the earth (earth sized abortion).
This is also rife with the joke I put in the book of Mormon. It is much worse in fact than the Book of Mormon in justifying anything a believer does to a non-believer because of the belief.
This book was very repetitive of the first two and I can’t tell if the guy likes telling the same stories over and over or if they repeated content between the books. I think it is the former. He references many of the good books and studies I’ve been listening to lately, like the marshmallow experiment from the willpower instinct. I really enjoy the points he has on mindfulness and not being attached to emotion, but I still can’t get behind the end goal. If the end goal is enlightenment and enlightenment is being fully detached from the world, then that is something that I don’t want. I want to be fully attached to the world, but in control of myself. I want to rule over my instinct, emotions, desires, and thoughts so that they don’t rule over me. To do this I think the practices of Buddhism are very spot on, but the end goals that we strive for diverge greatly.
Wow was this dry and not at all what I was expecting. This also was the worst narration of any book I’ve listened to. The narrator reads the chapter number and verse, then rereads the verse number for every single verse in the entire book. It was painful. The history of the people in the book was mainly along the lines of ‘the people sinned so God did not answer them or was wrath with them, then they were faithful again and God killed their enemies.’ Something I’ve been finding to be very true in most of the religious text I’ve been reading (besides Buddhist texts) is that they all follow the lines of the joke below
This book had many good stories and facts about the effects of salt, sugar, fat, and marketing. Something I found lacking in the book is any suggestions on plans of actions. It kept saying that something had to be done, and giving small stories about parents moving against vending machines or corner stores. There was no recommendation about how we can systematically change the factors that drive the salt, sugar, and fat phenomenon. Except for that I think the book is very informative and has a good message. I look forward to talking about it more in length with Steph when she finishes.
This book was very good. The arguments were laid out clearly and logically, with anecdotal supporting evidence. The concepts covered were very good, about getting other people to work for you the best that they can. The methods to doing this are creating the right atmosphere, asking good questions, not being the decision maker, and giving individuals more power and responsibility than they would normally get. Where I work has policies that are meant to support this kind of environment, and they work to a certain degree. I’d say this is my number two favorite book so far.
The title of this book is a misnomer. The book has very little about science, and the little it does have is half-science. It isn’t pseudoscience, just all the science in it is reported anecdotally. I was very disappointed by this book. There were also large portions of the book dedicated to meditations and overall expounding on meditation, mindfulness, and enlightenment having nothing to do with science. I would recommend avoiding this book. The book also had a bit of a different view on mindfulness and what that means vs. the way I had been understanding it in other books on the subject.
The one good thing I can say about this book is the way it points out how Buddhism, and other religious groups, could be more like the scientific community. The best of these is open logical discussions on policy and practice.
This was not that great of a listen. The author spent most of the time in somewhat related anecdotal stories, as well as only giving moderately useful guidance on what to do to better yourself. The last book I read “The Power of Habit” was much better, even though it only talks about willpower in one chapter of the book. This book also mirrored much of the Buddhist teachings of mindfulness that I’ve been listening to. It has been a really interesting how I’m hearing those Buddhist overtones in parts of many of the books I’m listening to now. I think it has to do with the ideas being very tested and refined. Western teachings on self-improvement are just catching up to the idea of being mindful. That said, I still don’t agree with some of the other Buddhist teachings.
This book shows some great ways to be less mindful and still good. The power of habit is all about how people get into habits, how they take over, and how they are structured. The habit is composed of 3 parts, the trigger, the action, and the reward. Knowing about how these 3 are a part of your habit will help in changing the habit. Triggers are something you try to recognize, not change. This is the same with the reward, just recognize the reward. In the middle of the habit change the action, so that the trigger can tell you when to do it and so that it produces the expected reward. This is a somewhat paradoxical way of mindfully being unmindful. As much as I don’t really buy into the whole end state of the Buddhist teaching, the practice of mindfulness has been nagging at me more and more. The power of habit makes unmindfulness mindful, and is something that can be leveraged when our willpower is low.
It's an Exciting World 