David Lockwood

Fooled by the Winners will change the way you think about the stock market, health care, global warming, diets, lotteries, restaurants, and your siblings. It will reshape your perspective of the past and give you a clearer view of the future. Fooled by the Winners is a book about survivor bias, the cognitive error of focusing on the winners, the successes, and the living. But in many instances, we can learn more from those who have lost, failed, or died. After reading this book, you will understand how survivor bias is often used to deceive us. You will learn how to stop paying for financial services that promise more than they deliver, for health care that doesn’t make us healthier, for diets that don’t make us slimmer, and for advice books that don’t offer good advice. You will also come away with a different view of our past, including our perilous evolutionary journey and how history has often been written by the winners. You will come to understand how we are fooled by the winners in warfare, such as in the deployment of nuclear weapons and the most famous example of survivor bias—the missing Allied bombers of WWII. Previous studies of survivor bias have been inaccessible to most, housed in formula-laden statistical journals. But you won’t find any math or technical jargon here. David Lockwood, a former member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, applies the concept of survivor bias to specific, real-world examples—minus the equations. Through compelling analysis and the real-life stories, this book demonstrates the deceptive influence of survivor bias in our daily lives and on our thinking.

How Survivor Bias Deceives Us

Fooled by the Winners

Confused by the Odds

Outplayed: How Game Theory Is Used Against Us will show you the ways in which people try to take advantage of you. It will guide you on how to structure incentives to get others to work with and not against you. It will help you determine when to cooperate—and when to compete. Outplayed is a book about game theory. Game theory is fundamentally about strategy and thus has applications far beyond poker, chess, or checkers. Game theory is part of our everyday lives, and it plays an important role in economics, finance, political science, and biology. After reading this book, you will understand how game theory is used against you. You will learn that the optimal strategy for a game undertaken only once is completely different from that of a game played repeatedly. You will come to know that if you want others to work with you, an Old Testament “an eye-for-an-eye” strategy is better than a New Testament “Turn the other cheek.” You will gain a different perspective on the differences between males and females and why the strategies of monogamy and polygamy are the primary weapons in the “battle of the sexes.” You will come to know why game theory sometimes determines who wins elections, and you will learn to question the assumptions behind the most important game currently being played—the game known as mutual assured destruction, or MAD, a deadly version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Previous books on game theory were inaccessible to most, due to the high level of mathematical fluency required. But there are no equations or proofs here. Lockwood, a former member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, applies game theory to a broad range of topics without the formulas.

How Game Theory Is Used Against Us

Outplayed

Robert Francis Kilvert

A New Selection from Kilvert's Diaries

Kilvert the Victorian

Michael Cummings

Peter Fries

William Spruiell

Currently there is a movement in linguistics towards careful use of corpora in linguistic and text analysis, which has involved both written and spoken corpora and those which combine spoken and written text. Most text analyses address written texts - often literary works - but detailed discussion of the language of a single oral text from multiple perspectives has rarely been published. This book is among the first to integrate the analysis of the language of spoken and written texts. It describes language as a network of functional relations involving a context which is also a network of functional relations. The essays in Part One present several perspectives on the theory of language as functional relations; those in Part Two discuss a single oral text using a variety of functional perspectives. All of the essays are by linguists interested in oral and written texts, who have achieved international recognition in their fields. Illustrated in this book are cognitive, social construction, social praxis and anthropological approaches to the description of text.

Relations and Functions Within and Around Language

The first study of CPI’s role in supporting the Indira Gandhi government during the Indian Emergency of 1975. India, June 1975. Fundamental rights are suspended. The Opposition is in jail. The Press is shut down. And Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has just declared Emergency. Only one political party supports Indira Gandhi’s action—the Communist Party of India (CPI). Why did the CPI take up this lonely and much-criticised stand? Were there any pressures from the Soviet Union or was the CPI looking for some political mileage? CPI’s stance on the issue has never been discussed, analysed and understood. In an exhaustive study of the period, David Lockwood lays bare the facts before us. Through personal interviews with CPI members, internal documents of the party and archives, he presents the most thorough study of the CPI and the Emergency so far.

The Communist Party of India and the Indian Emergency

This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students how to understand, analyse and describe syntactic phenomena in different languages. The book covers every aspect of syntax from the basics to more specialised topics, such as clitics which have grammatical importance but cannot be used in isolation, and negation, in which a construction contradicts the meaning of a sentence. The approach taken combines concepts from different theoretical schools, which view syntax differently. These include M. A. K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the stratificational school advocated by Sydney Lamb, and Kenneth L. Pike's tagmemic model. The emphasis of the book is on syntactic structures rather than linguistic meaning, and the book stresses the difference between a well-formed sentence and a meaningful one. The final chapter brings these two aspects together, to show the connections between syntax and semology. Each chapter concludes with exercises from a diverse range of languages and a list of major technical terms. The book also includes a glossary as an essential resource for students approaching this difficult subject for the first time.

A Constructional Approach

Syntactic Analysis and Description

December 1942: Calcutta is bombed by the Japanese air force. In the ensuing panic, one and a half million flee the almost defenseless city. The Japanese appear unstoppable and on their way to India. How did the political actors of the time react to the prospect of a Japanese invasion? The Congress regarded Britains presence in India as a provocation to the Japanese. They wanted it removed and were prepared to face the Japanese alone. The British, while maintaining a brave front, were not confident of their ability to hold India against the Japanese. The INA urged the Japanese to invade as long as they were in the front ranks and were permitted to rule India afterwards. David Lockwood investigates the reactions and plans of the Congress, the British and the Indian National Army (INA), concluding that the Japanese invasion revealed a good deal about the plans for India after the war, and that it was a part of the transition of the Indian State from the British to the Congress. Calcutta Under Fire offers a rare insight into a crucial period of contemporary Indian history.

Calcutta Under Fire - The World War Two Years

Why wasn’t there a successful bourgeois revolution in Russia? Was it because Russian capitalists were too servile in their relationship with the Tsarist autocracy? Or was it because Russian states (Tsarist, republican and Soviet) were just too strong? This book is a political history of the Russian capitalist class from 1850 to 1917 that seeks to answer these questions. The book covers the consistent opposition of the Russian bourgeoisie to the Tsarist autocracy up to and including the revolution of 1905. It then considers its alliance, from 1909, with ‘new state’ elements – officials, politicians, army officers and technical experts who were convinced of the possibility of reform and renovation through a radically reorganised state, cleansed of its autocratic detritus. Such a reorganisation was expected as a result of the Great War. While these ideas came to a temporary fruition in the February Revolution of 1917, they also laid the basis for a much more demanding Soviet state in October – and the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. The book ends with a consideration of the wider implications for the concept of the bourgeois revolution-implications that stretch well beyond Russia-that are revealed by the rise and fall of the Russian bourgeoisie.

David Lockwood

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