Novella, Dr. Steven, et al. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Grand Central, 2018. ***
I read this shortly after publication, nearly three years ago now, and haven’t gotten around to writing it up here mainly because my notes were so long! But I’ll dump them here anyway, with one pass to clean up and trim, and add a summary on the NF reviews page.
“The skeptical, critical thinking, and scientific principles outlined in this book are like the rungs of a long ladder that humanity has used to climb laboriously out of the swamp of superstition, bias, hubris, and magical belief. We tend to look back now at medieval beliefs and congratulate ourselves for being born in a later age. But not every individual or even every institution has followed our best thinkers out of the muck. We all need to climb the ladder for ourselves.”
(P.S. Novella, a neurologist at Yale, is founder and executive editor of Science-Based Medicine, and frequently writes on its site.)
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