How to improve your mind : twenty keys to unlock the modern world / James R. Flynn.

How to Improve Your Mind: Twenty Keys to Unlock the Modern World; Contents; List of Figures and Boxes; Acknowledgments; 1 Introduction: The Knowledge Trap; Wherein I Seek Rapport with the Reader; Key Concepts and Anti-Keys; Universities and the Knowledge Trap; Substitute for a Diary; Part 1 Arguing about Right and Wrong; 2 Logic and Moral Debate -- Attacks on Blacks; Blacks and Blackness; Taking the Hypothetical Seriously; Abortion and Its Slogans; Women and Femininity; The Unborn Mosquito; 3 Getting Rid of Tautologies -- No Private Clubs; Tautologies.

Tautologies Pretending to be Something Else; Falsification; Tautologies Used to Include or Exclude; Is Evolution a Tautology?; 4 The Naturalistic Fallacy and Its Consequences -- be Judgmental; Facts and Values; The Relevance of Facts; The Nihilist Fallacy; The Tolerance School Fallacy; The One-Way Street; Indignation and Ignorance; 5 But that is Unnatural -- Words Best Never Said; The Criterion of Being in Accord with Nature; The Criterion of Non-Interference with Nature; The Criterion of Imitating Nature; The Criterion of Preserving Nature; Using "Nature" Sensibly; The Limitations of Philosophy.

Part 2 The Truth about People; 6 Random Sample -- Quality Not Size; Quality Not Size; Statistical Significance; Why Some Prefer Bad Polls; Taking Bad Polls Without Realizing It; 7 Intelligence Quotient -- Hanging the Intellectually Disabled; Understanding IQ Scores; Adjusting IQ Scores; Death Row; The Significance of IQ Scores; 8 Intelligence Quotient -- and the Black/White IQ Gap; Correlations and Regression to the Mean; Uses and Abuses of Regression; Regression and Race; Regression not a Cause; 9 Control Group -- How Studying People Changes Them; Hidden Factors.

Sugar Pills and the "Hypnotic State"; Doctors and Pharmacists; Control Group; Good Luck; Making You Own Luck; Unavoidable Bad Luck; 10 The Sociologist's Fallacy -- Ignoring the Real World; Matching for SES; Matching Professions; The Easiest Kind of Matching; Under-Identified Models; Marx and Popper; Marx and History; Meritocracy and History; Concepts Plus Arithmetic; Part 3 The Market and Its Church; 11 Creating a Market -- Not a Frankenstein; The Market and Racial Profiles; What is Money?; When Does a Market Exist?; Selecting Who Can Participate: Free Trade?

Selecting Tradable Goods, Services, and Information; Prices, Costs, Income, and Profits; 12 Market Forces -- How they Take their Revenge; Rent Controls; Schools Vouchers; Regulating Prices in General; A Free Good; The Strange Case of the Conventional Tip; Regulating Wages and Supplementing Incomes; Regulating inheritance; Making a Public Park; 13 Market Worship -- No Ritual Sacrifices; The Tennessee Valley; Universities and Cargo Cults; The Market and Environmental Disaster; The Market and Benevolence; Personifying or Objectifying the Market; Future of the Market; The Market and its Church.

14 The Economic Collapse of 2008.

Become the master of your world. Presents 20 key concepts, or keys, to aid critical thinking Authored by one of the world's most eminent psychologists - and founder of the Flynn Effect Looks at topics such as Race and IQ, "good" science and the current world economic crisis Written in a clear and lucid style, illustrated with many examples.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.