After seeing links to the site Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) occasionally on my Facebook friends’ posts over the past few months, I added it to my morning regimen of sites to check every day.
Here’s today’s. Click for the site itself with a larger photo and an explanation (and click their photo for a really big photo).
Matthew Hutson, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane (Penguin/Hudson Street Press, 2012)
Yet another book about irrational beliefs and cognitive illusions! After the ones by Shermer, Duffy, and Rosenberg just discussed. The difference from all the others with this one, is that it takes a counter-intuitive, playful stance. Give in to your irrational beliefs, Hutson says, at least superficially, at least in some corner of your mind. You’ll be happier! And you can retain your rational understanding that these beliefs aren’t actually true, if pretending they’re true calms your nerves.
In other words, learn to harness, not eradicate, cognitive dissonance.
Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Delusions (2001, Norton)
Here’s a
nother book I’ve had since it was published but only got around to reading this past year.
This is a book about taking reality at face value, and not imbuing it with magical thinking or illusions.
And this is a book, I’ll mention upfront, that I don’t agree with on all its points. It seems to me that Rosenberg makes the error of reductionism that other writers, like Sean Carroll and Frank Wilczek, avoid.
This is the week Trump is being impeached for inciting a riot and invasion of the Capitol, and Republicans, supposedly the party of personal responsibility, are going to let him get away with it. Nothing to see here, they say. They are showing themselves to be not a party of principle, but an authoritarian cult (perhaps because they realize they cannot win on issues). They will live in infamy.
I repeat that I compile links like these not because I am a partisan hack. It’s because I aspire to be a student of history, and of human psychology. It’s because recent events in American history are examples of patterns in history, and of inclinations in human nature, that are always present. The authoritarian tendencies of Trump and his followers, and the mob violence of recent events, are continuing patterns throughout human history, and will never go away. At best they can be marshaled through education, the lessons of history, an awareness of human psychology, an awareness of the errors in how we perceive the world. But education is work and has to be redone with every generation; the default human nature is authoritarian tribalism, which sometimes resists education (or at best, filtered “home education.”) In deference to tribalism of one sort or another, especially religious, many people in the world avoid education that would challenge it.
Bobby Duffy, Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding (2018) (US edition Nov 2019)
Here’s another book on a seemingly familiar theme: why people so frequently misunderstand the world, and what we can do to correct our thinking. However it’s not aligned with Shermer’s WEIRD THINGS or Shtulman’s SCIENCEBLIND, as much as to Rosling’s FACTFULNESS in its focus on contemporary issues. It actually complements Rosling. Rosling arranges his book by “instinct” and shows how each one affects views of the world; Duffy arranges his book by peoples’ views of the world, and shows which biases or social effects cause them.
Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. (W.H. Freeman, 1997)
Here’s one of the earliest books that address human irrationality in terms of both the evidence against various pseudoscientific beliefs, and the psychological motivations that lead people to believe things that aren’t true. It wasn’t the first such book to do this; Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH (SOUL SEARCHING in the UK) did a good job the year before in 1996, and Thomas Gilovich did something similar in HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO in 1991. For that matter, Shermer’s book here is as much a collection of *what* weird things people believe, as much as it is about why they believe them; thus it aligns more with Martin Gardner’s FADS & FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE from 1952 than the other two titles just mentioned. (The weird things are mostly different; the pervasive credulousness hasn’t changed. I’ll have to glance back through Gardner to see if he had any speculations about *why*.)
This is a book I’ve had for nearly 20 years, since its publication in 2001, and finally I sat down last year, 2020, and read it. I had thought it would be a book about common misconceptions of the universe (as the subtitle says) along the lines of: there is no “dark” side of the moon; things fall at the same rate, regardless of weight (disregarding air friction); spaceships do not make sounds in space; and so on.
It’s partly about that, but just as much about *why* people believe incorrect things, with a heavy emphasis on psychological biases, intuitive thinking established in childhood, and social forces encouraging pseudo-science. Thus this book is on the same spectrum from that textbook LOGIC AND CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC, Shermer’s WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS, Bering’s THE BELIEF INSTINCT, Shtulman’s SCIENCELBIND, and the numerous books about human psychology, from Kahneman, Haidt, and others.
Items from NYT (Adam Grant); NYT (David Leonhardt); Slate (William Saletan); The Week, NYT, and Salon about Trump and the GOP; and NYT (Michelle Goldberg).
Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose earlier book A BEAUTIFUL QUESTION: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (2015) I have but have not yet read. (It looks fascinating – the kind big picture book, that tries to understand history or reality in the broadest possible terms, that I find especially compelling.)
His new book is FUNDAMENTALS: TEN KEYS TO REALITY, just published earlier this month. And partly because it’s relatively short, and partly because of my resolution to keep up on significant books as they are published, I read it right away, within the week after it was published.
It’s short and written in deceptively simple prose, some 228 pages of largish type in a book somewhat smaller than the standard hardcover. But that’s because the concepts he describes are often abstruse (as reality is, compared to mundane human understanding). It wasn’t a fast read; I found myself rereading paragraphs to make sure I understood his point.
Nicholas Kristof’s letter to his conservative friends; Paul Krugman on the party of bizarro; CNN on the post-Trump era; The Week’s Ryan Cooper on GOP extremity; Slate’s Jeremy Stahl asks House Republicans if they believe in Jewish Space Lasers.
