Tag: Review

Oh, the reading. I’ve currently got ‘The Hollow Men,’ ‘Oddzone’ and ‘Absolute Power’ on the go (and that’s just the Aotearoa Conspiracy Theory material).

Vicki Hyde’s ‘Oddzone‘ (New Holland, Auckland, 2006) is, for me, a mixed bag. I probably know just a little too much on the subjects it covers for this to be useful; I either know more detail than the chapters cover or the critical thinking material is just a little too thin (for someone who, in the words of the FHG, is a ‘professional critical thinker’).

I also have some small but niggling issues. On what is really a very minor matter Hyde claims that UFO just means Flying Saucer (p. 36), which isn’t a given (although I do approve of her using UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)). On a far more important issue I think she a bit of sneaky trick. It’s towards the end of her introductory critical thinking chapter.

Hyde presents what appears to be a logic puzzle and then states that amongst all the answers people have come up with to it, virtually no one ever claims the answer is that she is either lying or mistaken (p. 28). I don’t think this is a particularly fair trick to play on people; if you pose a conundrum (her label) most of your audience is going to think that it is solvable (even if it requires a piece of clever thinking). Psychologically, I think it is fair to say, we write off the possibility that the person posing the conundrum is lying (that there is an answer); indeed, the way the conundrum is posed makes it look as if it can be answered. A response of ‘You’re lying’ doesn’t seem to solve the puzzle.

(The other response she thinks should be offered, ‘You’re mistaken’ also seems to be psychologically locked off because, at least in her case, if you’ve asked someone to come along and give a talk to your group you’re not expecting them to be (overly) mistaken in their thinking…)

Now, Hyde is right to say that we should be sceptical (at some appropriate level) in regards to the utterances of others (we should, at least, admit the possibility that some testimony is false), but the conundrum she poses isn’t the right kind of example to teach this important lesson. This is because the conundrum doesn’t solicit the principle in the right way; people who hear it are, I suspect, going to feel just a little cheated by its solution. Which is a pity, because, overall, the chapter is quite good as an introduction to some core principles of critical thinking and if I decide to teach another introductory course on scepticism in the near future I’d be keen to use it.

(I’m also somewhat curious as to whether Hyde really thinks the example belongs in that chapter; it’s printed as an aside and part of me wonders whether it is there to fill the book out rather than as an illustration vital to the discourse. Then again, this might just be a reflection of my prejudices about layouts coming to the fore.)

 It took me a while to get around to reading it, but I’ve just munched through Thomas Kida’s ‘Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The Six Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking.’ Its been getting high praise from the higher-ups in the American Skeptical Movement and I believe it even got a good review in the Fortean Times.  It’s good, but good as in ‘It’s okay but not great.’ Certainly, if you are going to read an accessible book on Critical Thinking you can’t go wrong. It’s a bit breathless in places and there’s a certain inconsistency in his treatment of the weird and wacky. Interestingly enough Kida doesn’t really go into any depth about the problems with appeals to authority because, I think, he can’t. The book rests upon the credentials of people whose expertise he does not explicate. Kahneman, Travesky and Gilvovich are cited ad nauseam and whilst I know how good their work is there is nothing in Kida to tell you that these people are on the cutting edge of the psychological work in ratonality. Had he talked more about appeals to authority it could have made his work more difficult because he relies on authorities for glib statements all the time, but the conscientious reader will notice the lack and think long hard thoughts about it. It has a few niggling errors; he mischaracterises Gossip and Rumour as linear transmission of propositions rather than as complex interchanges, for an example, but, then again, some of the material in the book is so fresh and new, such as the nice, long critique of the thesis in Economics that agents in the market are rational and how playing the stockmarket rather than investing in index funds is irrational. (He also keeps coming back to the invasion of Iraq as a case study in how thinking goes wrong, which will piss off a large number of readers and also date the book in a few years time. It’s also a very American book with long examples to do with baseball and basketball (including some strange terminology issues; in some sections he refers to African-Americans and in others he refers to Blacks) which made it hard to concerntrate, being quite anti-sport…)   Still, the book has given me a number of new tricks to try and pull on my students and it’s also been useful in sorting out what a provisional book of my own should take in and what it would develop. I may well use a section of it as a quick-and-easy primer for my Med School students but I’m not likely to be recommending the text to people any time soon. Then again, I’m in my disillusionment stage of the being a Sceptic and what I really want is to read another book like ‘The Sceptical Occultist,’ which is a fun read and, whilst it has faults galore, works through issues rather than presents them as solved before the reader even turned the page.