When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
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When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
Narrated by:
Fred Sanders
Buy Now for £13.84
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Narrated by:
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Fred Sanders
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By:
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Steven Pinker
It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from meeting up at a time and place to forming enduring bonds of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also may strive to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that seem to come from out of nowhere, the eruption of cancel culture, and even the awkwardness of a first date.
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Critic reviews
"Fred Sanders delivers this audiobook about metacognition with a perfect balance of erudition and approachability. Psychology professor Pinker describes how we understand our thoughts and how we know what others are thinking. To frame this discussion, he evokes the classic moment from the ‘90s television show “Friends,” the one in which Phoebe realizes “they don’t know we know they know!” That scene played for laughs, but Pinker is seriously applying this approach to the understanding of shared knowledge, as well as how we can be misunderstood. Social media is rife with examples of attempts at humor or sarcasm being taken out of context. Sanders doesn’t oversell these themes; he delivers Pinker’s ideas clearly, trusting that listeners will follow them."
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