Readings on and for smart pople

Books

• Joel Best (2006): Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads, University of California Press, http://books.google.de/books?id=zbxwRvpwlLQC
• Keith Baliey and Karen Leland (2006): Watercooler Wisdom: How Smart People Prosper in the Face of Conflict, Pressure, & Change. http://www.amazon.com/Watercooler-Wisdom-Prosper-Conflict-Pressure/dp/1572244364
• Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller (2007): Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind's Reproductive System. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=mating+intelligence&x=0&y=0 A review: " This book introduces a new construct called 'Mating Intelligence' (MI) which concerns cognitive processes that uniquely apply to the domain of human mating, sexuality, and intimate relationships...In sum, this book is necessarily challenging in many ways. It is ambitious in both its breadth and its goals. It was designed to bridge an important and conspicuous gap in the psychological literature; the gap between scholarship on human mating and scholarship on intelligence...(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)"
• Laurence Gonzales (2008): Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things, Norton& Company, http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Survival-People-Stupid-Things/dp/0393058387
• Barry Libert, Jon Spector, Don Tapscott (2007): We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, http://books.google.com/books?id=NTXfAdcWdDwC&hl=en
  • We Are Smarter community: http://wearesmarter.org
• Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela (1992): Tree of Knowledge. http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Knowledge-Humberto-R-Maturana/dp/0877736421/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228080282&sr=1-4
• Steve Pavlina (2008): Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, Hay House, http://books.google.com/books?id=OZzLnGH74ToC&hl=en

Journal/Magazine Articles

• Chris Argyris (1991): Teaching Smart People How to Learn. in: Harvard Business Review, Vol. 69, Nr. 3, S. 99-109.
• Viadero, Debra, Insights Gained into Arts and Smarts. Education Week; v27 n27 p1, 10-11 Mar 2008.
  • Findings released this week from three years of studies by neuroscientists and psychologists at seven universities help amplify scientists' understanding of how training in the arts might contribute to improving the general thinking skills of children and adults. The idea that the arts, and music in particular, could make children smarter in other ways gained currency in the 1990s, after a pair of researchers published a study showing that college students performed better on some mathematical tests after listening to a 10-minute Mozart sonata. The news led to some widely reported, if fleeting, efforts to promote music learning. Georgia legislators, in fact, even voted to provide parents of newborns with tapes of classical music. But most neuroscientists viewed such policy moves as premature: The studies never definitively determined whether exposure to music, or other arts, causes changes in the brain that sharpen other kinds of thinking skills. Left unsettled, experts say, is whether the arts make people smarter or whether smart people simply gravitate to the arts.
• Sternberg, Robert J., Why smart people can be so foolish. European Psychologist; 2004, Vol. 9 Issue: Number 3 p145-150, 6p
  • Not only stupid people act foolishly: Smart people can act foolishly by virtue of their thinking they are too smart to do so. Such people tend to act foolishly through the commission of one or more of five cognitive fallacies: (1) unrealistic optimism, whereby they believe that they are so smart that they can do whatever they want and not worry about it; (2) egocentrism, whereby they focus on themselves and what benefits them while discounting or even totally ignoring their responsibilities to others; (3) omniscience, whereby they believe they know everything, instead of knowing what they do not know; (4) omnipotence, whereby they believe they can do whatever they want because they are all-powerful; and (5) invulnerability, whereby they believe that they will get away with whatever they do, no matter how inappropriate or irresponsible it may be. The antidote to foolishness is wisdom. The balance theory of wisdom proposes that people are wise to the extent they apply their intelligence, creativity, and wisdom toward a common good by balancing their own interests, the interests of others, and the interests of organizations or other supra-individual entities; over the long and short terms; through the infusion of values; to adapt to, shape, and select environments.
• Barab, Sasha and Plucker, Jonathan. Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, and Talent Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning. Educational Psychologist; September 1, 2002, Vol. 37 Issue: Number 3 p165-182, 18p
  • Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual-environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole persons and particular contexts through which individuals appear knowledgeably skillful. The purpose of this article is to support a concept of ability and talent development that is theoretically grounded in 5 distinct, yet interrelated, notions: ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation. Although talent may be reserved by some to describe individuals possessing exceptional ability and ability may be described as an internal trait, in our description neither ability nor talent are possessed. Instead, they are treated as equivalent terms that can be used to describe functional transactions that are situated across person-in-situation. Further, and more important, by arguing that ability is part of the individual-environment transaction, we take the potential to appear talented out of the hands (or heads) of the few and instead treat it as an opportunity that is available to all although it may be actualized more frequently by some.

Articles in Wikis & Blogs

• It's interesting to do a 'smart' search on some potentially fruitful blogs, such as Stephen Downes' http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi

Videos

• James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_surowiecki_on_the_turning_point_for_social_media.html
  • James Surowiecki argues that people, when we act en masse, are smarter than we think. He's the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and writes about finance for the New Yorker.