THIRD MILLENNIUM THINKING

A primer on how to think like a scientist and make effective, thoughtful decisions for you, your family, and the world. The three co-authors are Nobel Prize-winning scientist Saul Perlmutter, globally-renowned philosopher John Campbell, and award-winning social psychologist Robert MacCoun.

In an age of science skepticism and information (and misinformation) overload, readers are eager to understand the causes of the rift between society and science - and for tools they can use to identify truth and find common ground. An innovative, timely and accessible read, THIRD MILLENNIUM THINKING is the first comprehensive guide to the fundamental ideas, approaches, and thinking tools of science, and to illuminate their potential to help us navigate effectively in the too-much-information/too-much-misinformation age. It will appeal to fans of books like NOISE by Cass Sunstein, Olivier Sibony, and Daniel Kahneman, NUDGE by Thaler and Sunstein, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW by Steven Pinker, and THINK AGAIN by Adam Grant.

THIRD MILLENNIUM THINKING introduces readers to the culture of science, consisting of a set of ever-evolving ideas, frameworks, tools, and procedures that scientists use to understand the world, and explain why these skills are useful to all of us. These "3MT skills" and ideas that the book examines are hard-won insights that have been proposed, tested, and taught over centuries--and new ones have been added to the scientific culture at an ever-increasing pace. The book brings together these skills and ideas in one place for the first time, using provocative thought exercises, clear distillations of complex ideas, jargon-free language, and vivid examples drawn from history and daily life.
Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun team up to guide readers charting a course through a profusion of possibilities; achieving a ground level understanding of the facts and levers of the modern world; and then to viewing those facts and levers through the lens of values, goals, and fears in order to make decisions and take actions together across apparent conflict. By the end of the book, readers won't suddenly be trained scientists, but we will understand what science and scientists have to offer and be able to use 3MT skills to make effective, thoughtful decisions, as individuals, in couples, and as citizens in a larger society.

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. Among many awards and honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Perlmutter has become widely recognized in the world of popular science and has appeared frequently in national media, including BBC, Discovery Channel documentaries, NPR's "Fresh Air," "Talk of the Nation," and "TED Radio Hour," Freakonomics Radio, PBS Newshour and PBS NOVA. He has also been featured in national print outlets ranging from The Economist, The New Yorker, and Harvard Business Review to Air & Space magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American, as well as in a host of international, regional, and science-focused publications in print and online.

Robert MacCoun is a social psychologist and public policy analyst who currently is a Professor of Law at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was previously a member of the faculties of both the Law School and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. From 1986- 1993 he was a behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation, where he served as a staff member at the Institute for Civil Justice and the Drug Policy Research Center as well as a faculty member at the RAND Graduate School of Policy Studies. In 2019, MacCoun received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science for "a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research." MacCoun frequently publishes pieces in opinion media ranging from Foreign Policy to New England Journal of Medicine and is a frequently quoted expert on policy issues in publications ranging from The New Yorker to The New York Post.

John Campbell is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Campbell is the author of several academic books and has given the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard, the Carnap Lectures at Bochum (Germany), the Simon Lectures at Toronto, the Clark Lecture at Indiana, and the Gramlich Lecture at Dartmouth. He was Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2003-2004, Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2001-2004), and British Academy Research Reader (1995-1997). Campbell was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 2017.