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HAF Book Club: January poll and discussion

Started by Sandra Craft, December 08, 2020, 10:54:28 PM

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Sandra Craft

Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American at Home and Abroad, by Firoozeh Dumas. A collection of humorous vignettes by the author of Funny in Farsi, primarily centered on the misadventures of her Iranian immigrant family.  (256 pages)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.  Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.  (288 pages)

The Sky's the Limit, by Anna Magnusson.  In 2004, Vicky Jack completed the Seven Summits - the highest mountains in each of the seven continents. Whilst pursuing her climbing dream, she also carried on a high-flying career. This book tells her story.  (212 pages)

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: a memoir, by Haruki Murakami.  Based on Murakami's journal about training for the NYC marathon, it's about writing, running and how they intersect.   (188 pages)

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, by Michael Shermer.  A no-holds-barred assault on popular superstitions and prejudices.  (384 pages)

Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

xSilverPhinx

I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Sandra Craft

Well this is a tremendous surprise  ::)  -- January's book is Weird Things.  Should be a fun read.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

xSilverPhinx

Quote from: Sandra Craft on December 23, 2020, 11:41:37 PM
Well this is a tremendous surprise  ::)  -- January's book is Weird Things.  Should be a fun read.

;D
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Sandra Craft

Still only half way thru Weird Things, but getting into the meaty parts.  I found the first few chapters surprisingly dry but the pace picked up when Shermer got into specific weird things. 

I thought he treated Ayn Rand a bit more gently than she deserved, but then he does try very hard to be both even-handed and fair, which is to be commended.  I suppose.

Having lived thru the days of Satanic Panic and Recovered Memory hysteria, I found that chapter particularly interesting.  He mentions the book, The Courage to Heal, which enjoyed intense popularity in the US for a few years and was practically the bible of the Recovered Memory movement.  I eventually gave into curiosity and bought a copy, despite my embarrassment over being seen with it (I even went to a bookstore where none of the clerks knew me, and still got one of those looks).

I read the list of signs that one had been sexually abused as a child and had repressed the memory of it, a list that I remember as extremely bizarre.  It not only included many things that seemed to me innocuous and commonplace (like memories -- not necessarily sexual -- being triggered by smell) but sometimes contradictory, like not sleeping enough and sleeping too much.  Still, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt since everyone reacts differently to trauma until I came to the last two signs, which were both remembering abuse and not remembering abuse being signs of abuse.  That's when I thought, "this doesn't seem at all scientific".

I read it all the way thru, because this was back in the days before I'd reached the life's-too-short point in reading and always finished what I'd started, and immediately donated it to the library.  It was one of my more expensive book buying mistakes.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Was very busy last month and the start of this month. I did have time to read the book, though I took very few notes for my review.

The book covers a lot about what strange things people believe in and dives a bit into why but most of it is about tricks bad faith actors use (either intentionally or not), to deceive people into believing weird things. The author explains the various techniques used to trick people, but I think that is only useful to people before they're tricked and I think that's only moderately successful.

I'm not sure why the author agrees so much with Ayn Rand, and he doesn't really explain other than agreeing with using rationality to figure out the world. If that's all, that's still only 25% of her professed ideology and it wasn't even the main one. Anyway, I find it odd for a person saying they are rational and also say that they agree with Rand.

A good portion of the book covers a lot of denial of the holocaust which is more than I was aware of and I thought I was aware of a lot of it. The holocaust deniers use every dishonest trick in the book and there are is so much supporting evidence that a rational person could not deny it, which is why it's a good example for the book and probably why it took up so much of it.

It is a good book and the author does a good job explaining what people believe and the tricks charlatans use to bamboozle people with. It was on the longer side and with references it takes a bit of extra time to get through.

All that is good, but after so long and reading so much about all that, I'd like to know what can be done about it. We can teach rationality and critical thinking in schools, but I feel like that's only going to be part of it and will only be marginally effective. I think we should do it, but what we also need is some way to better reach those who have already fallen into the traps.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on January 17, 2021, 10:10:00 PM[...]this was back in the days before I'd reached the life's-too-short point in reading and always finished what I'd started[...].
I didn't reach that point until a few years ago.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

From my FB review:

Just to make it clear, exactly why people believe strange things only makes up the last few chapters of this book.  The first few chapters are a lot of dry, technical stuff and the great big part in the middle is assorted weird things and some techniques used to manipulate people into believing them but not why they do.

For those really interested in the why of it, I will skip to the end:

1.  Comfort.  As Shermer points out, "It is a very human response to believe in things that make us feel better."

2.  Simplicity.  Otherwise known as an easy solution to a hard problem.

3.  Morality and meaning.  This seems to me an extension of the first two, but Shermer calls it out separately.

4.  Hope springing eternal.  Shermer writes, "humans are, by nature, a forward-looking species always seeking greater levels of happiness and satisfaction".  Even if we have to trick ourselves into it.

In the meaty center of the book, he breaks down various weird things into more categories than I imagined there would be.  There is, of course, the very obvious categories of pseudoscience and superstition -- he used Edgar Cayce as someone who combined both of those for double impact.  He goes to Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment, and has this experience:

"After the ESP experiment, one woman followed me out of the room and said, 'You're one of those skeptics, aren't you?'
'I am indeed,' I responded.
'Well, then,' she retorted, 'how do you explain coincidences like when I go to the phone to call my friend and she calls me?  Isn't that an example of psychic communication?'
'No, it is not,' I told her.  'It is an example of statistical coincidences.  Let me ask you this: How many times did you go to the phone to call your friend and she did not call?  Or how many times did your friend call you but you did not call her first?'
She said she would have to think about it and get back to me.  Later, she found me and said she had figured it out: 'I only remember the times that these events happen, and I forget all those others you suggested.'
'Bingo!' I exclaimed, thinking I had a convert.  'You got it.  It is just selective perception.'
But I was too optimistic.  'No,' she concluded, 'this just proves that psychic power works sometimes but not others.' "

Being a hopeful person, I like to think that given time to get past the automatic defensiveness most of us have, she would have indeed become a convert but without the satisfaction of Shermer knowing it.

He also deals with near-death experiences and justifications (both religious and scientific) for immortality, alien abduction (and what it is with the probing fetish?), witch crazes past and present (included here is a skimming of the McMartin Pre-School trial of the 1980s -- which affected me for life, repressed memory syndrome and associated baseless incest accusations), and the to my mind truly looney Ayn Rand cult. 

The biggest and most scientifically involved part of the book is when he gets into weird beliefs about evolution and creationism as a "science".  This area is his specialty so he can be forgiven for going all out here.  There is a long chapter on confronting creationists and creation arguments which is interesting even without the likelihood of ever using it.

Of particular interest to me where the chapters on Holocaust denial, and his research into the basis of the deniers arguments (wasn't particularly surprised to discover there was a lot of dodgy counting going on.  Rather like Trump and his counting of votes in both 2016 and 2020). 

There's a short chapter on the perceptions of race, and a critique of the book "The Bell Curve", which I'm still surprised was as popular as it was when it and it's methods were roundly denounced by genetic scientists everywhere when it first came out.  But we don't really listen to scientists much in this country.

Just one more thing I'm going to mention is the chapter on why smart people sometimes believe weird things.  Per Shermer, smart people tend to think they simply cannot be tricked because they're so smart, and their tendency to look so hard for the trick that they miss it because that's exactly what the trickster is guarding against.  This squares with something I read decades ago, by a  professional magician whose name I've forgotten, who wrote something to the effect that it was easier to fool a roomful of mathematicians with a magic trick than a roomful of street sweepers. 

I found this book fascinating and strongly recommend it.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany