Nik Matthews (77 results)

Condition: New.

Condition: New.

Condition: New.

Condition: New.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Pictorial laminated boards. "Great Mysteries" series by Wayland. discusses the Standing Stones, the Pyramids, the Statues of Easter Island, the Plains of Nazca and Mysterious Mounds. Spender, Nik (illustrator). Book.

Condition: good. A copy that has been read, remains in good condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact. The spine and cover show signs of wear. Pages can include notes and highlighting and show signs of wear, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. 100% GUARANTEE! Shipped with delivery confirmation, if you're not satisfied with purchase please return item! Ships via media mail.…

Condition: New.

Condition: good. A copy that has been read, remains in good condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact. The spine and cover show signs of wear. Pages can include notes and highlighting and show signs of wear, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. 100% GUARANTEE! Shipped with delivery confirmation, if you're not satisfied with purchase please return item! Ships via media mail. Spender, Nik (illustrator).…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - The Art of Holding an OpinionA book about belief, doubt, intellectual freedom, and the discipline of changing your mindMost of us treat our opinions like possessions. We defend them, decorate them, and feel attacked when someone questions them. We rarely examine the machinery that produced them.Nik Matthews argues that the quality of a mind is measured less by the opinions it holds than by the processes that form, test, and revise them. Drawing on psychology, philosophy, and the habits of the best forecasters and scientists, he shows how the mind manufactures certainty from scraps of evidence, how beliefs fuse with identity, and why intelligence often makes us better at defending conclusions rather than examining them.Across five parts, the book moves from diagnosis to practice:¿ How the 'opinion factory' works and why your mind mistakes its own models for reality¿ Why other people's beliefs are evidence about their minds-and how to read them without weaponizing the insight¿ The inner lawyer that argues for whatever you already believe, and the emotional architecture that keeps worldviews locked in place¿ Practical standards for evidence, expertise, and the burden of proof¿ How to hold beliefs firmly enough to act while remaining open enough to change them when the evidence demands itThis is not a book that tells you what to think about politics, culture, or science. It is a manual for the harder skill: holding opinions with discipline, revising them without shame, and remaining free of both dogmatism and paralyzing skepticism.Success, Matthews writes, is not a head full of correct conclusions. It is becoming the kind of person who can say, about a deeply held belief, 'Here is the evidence that would make me drop it'-and mean it.A clear-eyed, practical guide for anyone who wants to think better in an age that rewards certainty and punishes revision.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Most of the decisions that matter are underdetermined. The information never points to one perfect answer. Waiting for certainty is not diligence-it is a sophisticated form of avoidance.You stand in the cereal aisle for eleven minutes. You research a job offer for six weeks. You replay a relationship decision at 3 a.m. In each case the mind insists there is a "right" choice waiting to be found if you just think harder, read more, or wait a little longer. That insistence is the Certainty Trap-and it is quietly costing you time, energy, opportunities, and peace of mind.Decide Anyway is a practical field guide for acting well when the data will not settle the question. Drawing on ancient skeptical philosophy, modern decision science, and hard-won personal experience, Nik Matthews shows why the demand for guarantees creates anxiety, delay, and regret-and how to replace that demand with a clearer, calmer way of choosing. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Most people do not choose their lives. They accumulate them.A job becomes a career. A hobby becomes an obligation. An interest becomes an identity. A friendship becomes a social expectation. A subscription becomes a daily stream of notifications. One by one, these small yeses harden into a dense architecture of commitments, open loops, and maintenance demands. You can own almost nothing and still live an enormously complicated life.The Minimum Life offers a different question: not "What can I discard?" but "What is the minimum I actually need?"This is not another decluttering guide or productivity system. It is a practical philosophy for reducing the invisible load-desires, projects, identities, social obligations, and information streams-so that residual attention, empty time, and genuine aliveness become possible again.Across nine parts, Nik Matthews diagnoses the complexity trap, shows how desire is manufactured, dismantles the productivity and identity traps, and introduces concrete tools: the life audit, the subtraction method, the minimum viable life, and the complexity budget. He argues for the pleasure of not having, the right to remain uninformed, the freedom of being ordinary, and the wealth of empty time.The goal is not austerity. The minimum is not the least. It is the smallest sustainable arrangement that still contains the things that make you more alive-deep relationships, absorbing work, sensory pleasure, recovery, and the inefficient joys that pure optimization would discard.You are allowed to want less.You are allowed to do less.You are allowed to become less impressive.And somehow end up with more life. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Stop Trying to Be SomebodyHow to Escape the Prison of Other People's ExpectationsYou were handed a plan: get educated, build a career, find someone, buy things, become successful, maintain a reputation, keep improving. Everyone around you is following it. Most of the time, so are you.Then one day you ask the question the plan never prepared you for: What if you don't actually want the life you're optimizing for?This book is not another call to hustle harder, find your authentic self, or become the best version of yourself. It is an investigation into a quieter, more unsettling possibility: that a great deal of what we call self-improvement is actually self-conformity. You may be spending your entire life polishing a personality assembled by family expectations, school reward systems, career prestige ladders, social media scoreboards, and cultural scripts-without ever consciously choosing it. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Your brain is not your friend.It is a brilliant, ancient survival system optimized for a world that no longer exists. It was designed to keep a mammal alive long enough to reproduce-not to make you happy, rational, productive, or accurate about reality. The same machinery that once detected predators in tall grass now generates anxiety about unread emails. The instincts that kept small tribes loyal now fuel tribal politics and status obsession. The reward systems calibrated for scarce calories and novelty now drive endless scrolling, overeating, and the pursuit of dopamine hits that never quite satisfy.The result is a mind that constantly gets in your way: catastrophizing, seeking confirmation, defending its ego, chasing status, and mistaking feelings of certainty for evidence of truth.Your Brain Is Not Your Friend is a clear-eyed user's manual for the mind you actually have. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and practical behavioral design, Nik Matthews explains: - Why your brain is a prediction engine that prefers coherent stories over accurate ones- How confirmation bias, tribalism, status-seeking, and catastrophizing are features, not bugs- Why you don't know why you do most of what you do-and why your memory is not a recording- How modern life (infinite entertainment, social media, abundance) exploits ancient reward systems- Why willpower fails and environment design, friction, and simple protocols succeedMore importantly, the book shows you how to become the operator instead of the passenger. You will learn to catch thoughts before they catch you, build a "second layer" of systems that work when willpower doesn't, design your environment so good behavior is the path of least resistance, and choose goals before your brain's ancient incentives choose them for you.This is not another catalog of cognitive biases or a vague call to "be more mindful." It is a practical, no-nonsense guide to understanding the machine in your head and routing around its most costly failures. You cannot rewire millions of years of evolutionary engineering. But you can stop treating every thought, feeling, and urge as an instruction from a higher authority.Your brain is doing its job. Your job is to decide whether its job is still useful. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In 1848, two young German exiles published a short pamphlet arguing that industrial capitalism was doomed. Seventy years later, revolutionaries quoting that pamphlet seized the largest country on earth and set out to abolish private property, markets, and the wage system. Over the next century, governments inspired by those ideas ruled a third of the world's population, electrified peasant empires, achieved mass literacy and space programs-and produced famine, forced labor, and some of the worst state-organized catastrophes in history.Then the system largely collapsed. The market, it seemed, had won.Except the argument never really ended.The Socialist Experiment is neither a defense of socialism nor a victory lap for capitalism. It is a clear-eyed reconstruction of the most ambitious attempt ever made to replace the market, and an honest accounting of what that attempt revealed. Beginning in the villages and guild towns the market displaced, it follows the transformation of land, labor, and capital through the factories and slums of industrial England. It examines Marx's genuine insights and the places his theory broke. It walks through the actual experiments-utopian communes, War Communism, Stalin's command economy, Maoist China, Yugoslav self-management, cooperatives, democratic socialism, and the welfare state-and stages the enduring arguments about incentives, knowledge, and power.The book shows why socialism emerged not from envy or irrationality but from real problems industrial capitalism created, and why those problems did not vanish when the experiments failed. It explains how markets coordinate dispersed knowledge and generate innovation, and how they also produce outcomes no one chose, convert needs into purchasing power, and concentrate power in ways that threaten political equality. Most modern economies, it argues, are hybrids: messy, pragmatic mixtures of markets, regulation, redistribution, and collective provision that no pure ideology can claim.Socialism failed to abolish the market. It succeeded in forcing the market to explain why it deserved to survive. That explanation is still being written, and we are living inside it.For readers of economic history, political ideas, and anyone who senses that the old twentieth-century debate is not quite finished. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Walk into a supermarket and try to understand what you're looking at. Thousands of products, assembled from materials across continents, delivered in exactly the right quantities-without any central planner, without anyone understanding the whole system. This is the great puzzle of capitalism, and it is a genuine puzzle.In The Capitalist Machine, Nik Matthews treats capitalism not as an ideology to defend or attack, but as a machine: an extraordinary coordination technology with inputs, feedback loops, failure modes, and unintended consequences. Drawing on Adam Smith, Hayek, Schumpeter, and modern economic insight, the book explains how markets solve the knowledge problem, multiply productivity through specialization, transmit information through prices, and select winners through competition and creative destruction.It then turns the same clear-eyed analysis on the machine's darker effects. Markets have no conscience. They externalize costs, create monopolies, turn attention into inventory, and gradually reshape the humans who operate them-transforming desire, labor, identity, and even the sense of what a good life looks like. The machine is brilliant at answering "how." It is largely silent on "why."Neither a celebration nor a demolition, The Capitalist Machine is a rigorous, accessible examination of the most powerful coordination system ever built. It shows why markets work so well, where they systematically fail, what they are doing to us while they work, and how we might decide-deliberately and democratically-what the machine should be allowed to do.For readers who want to understand capitalism without slogans: how it coordinates strangers at planetary scale, why it produces both abundance and alienation, and what happens when a system optimized for growth and engagement meets questions of purpose, meaning, and human flourishing. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. For nearly four hundred years, power has belonged to whoever controls territory. Draw a line on a map, put an army behind it, and you have a sovereign state. That Westphalian bargain shaped the modern world so completely that we stopped noticing it was a design choice rather than a law of nature.Look around now and ask where power actually lives.The maps still show countries. But the systems your daily life depends on-the cloud that holds your files, the payment networks that move your money, the satellite constellations that locate your phone, the AI systems that mediate knowledge, the platforms that govern speech-are controlled by a handful of corporations. These companies do not need to become states. They become functionally sovereign by controlling the infrastructure upon which states and populations depend.This book names the emerging order infrastructural feudalism.It traces how the corporation, originally a legal tool chartered by states, escaped territorial control through mobile capital and planetary-scale systems. It develops a framework of five layers of corporate sovereignty-economic, infrastructural, informational, security, and cognitive-and shows how AI accelerates the transformation by allowing corporations to become increasingly autonomous. It takes the feudal analogy seriously: overlapping authorities, layered identity, exit as the last form of political power, and the possibility of both corporate serfdom and competitive private governance.From company towns and private arbitration to app stores, satellite networks, and frontier AI models, the signs of quasi-sovereignty are already visible. The book explores why space may host the first genuinely sovereign corporate entities, the mutual dependency between states (which still have guns) and the infrastructure they cannot function without, and three possible futures: a corporate renaissance of competing jurisdictions, a corporate feudal order of permanent lock-in, and a decentralized future in which the infrastructure itself becomes hard to own.The central question is disarmingly simple: what happens when the people who control the infrastructure become more important than the people who control the territory?The next feudal lord may not own a castle. He may own the server farm, the satellite constellation, the power plant, and the intelligence running all three.This is speculative political analysis written for clarity and urgency. Some of what it describes is already happening. Some of it may never happen. The value of the exercise is preparation before the map finishes changing. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…