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.
Category: General
As Seen by Rachel Hunter
I’m currently reading “Unexplained New Zealand: Ghosts, UFOs and Mysterious Creatures” by Julie Miller and Grant Osborn. It’s “interesting” thus far; i’s just a catalogue of haunted sites from post-colonial New Zealand with little theory as to how and why. Chapter Three, however, is a collection of sightings by celebrities. It doesn’t present the material explicitly as “And here are famous people you admire who claim to have seen ghosts; must be something to it” but the implication is there. We get a litany of celebrities such as Peter Jackson, Sir Edmund Hilary and… Rachel Hunter. I can’t really judge her as an expert; I’m no follower of former fashion models, but whilst these people might well be examples of New Zealanders who have excelled in their field I can’t really imagine them to be examples of clear and critical reasoners. Hilary, for one, has been responsible for some fairly weird statements about conservation, eco-tourism and the like (and made the unfortunate mistake of not condemning outright the theory that the Celts got to New Zealand first).
I’m not sure whether I’ve written about the fallacious appeal to authority and I’m not sure I need to. Some of us will remember the ad for painkillers fronted by one of the actors from “The Flying Doctors:”
Hi, I’m not a doctor but I do play one on TV. When pain persists I use…
I don’t seem to recall it lasting particularly long; I think the public rightly found it laughable. Still, such appeals seem to fool certain parts of the population and it’s probably because we value celebrity in a fairly obnoxious way (which could be cultural or it might just be a biological urge; evolution has done some funny things to the development of our psyche (he says in such a way that it seems to suggest it could have been formed otherwise)). Beliefs, such as those found in ghosts, which are usually frowned upon seem to gain some kind of weird, context-specific, justification if you find out so-and-so also believes it. This seems true of Conspiracy Theories; much is made (on the interweb) of the fact that Charlie (sorry, Charles) Sheen not only thinks 9/11 was an inside job but that he believes it so fervently that he wants to narrate the third edition of “Loose Change.”
Convinced? I wasn’t….That’s what people like me think, anyway.
Hmm.
(A short note, seeing that I’ve just finished the book. It seems that a lot of sightings of anomalies are often made by the same person and this seems suspicious, but as I was deliberating what to make of it there was a section on the catching of the record-breaking colossal squid that was caught a few years back off the coast of Aotearoa and the skipper of that trawler was responsible for catching the last record-breaking colossal squid. Sometimes these things happen; no one said probability theory was intuitive.)
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Postscript
I wrote this post several days before Sir Edmund Hillary died. I make no apologies for the tone in re his intellect. He did do great things with ‘Citizens for Rowling,’ after all.
Back, back, back from the…
Well, I’m back from me holidays. I spent the last few days at the Parihaka Peace and Music Festival, which was rather interesting; a whole lot of different Conspiracy Theories with ranging plausibility were uttered and news of disturbing import to our future survival was shared. The only thing I’m going to pass on is that no matter where you come from on the Political Spectrum(TM) you will enjoy Robert Newman’s ‘A History of Oil.’ I’m sure the internet has copies if you care to look.
Not Spent
The last post was part of a grand experiment using WordPress’s import filters, an experiment that went disastrously wrong. I may be spent elsewhere, but not here. Indeed, I have new vigour and life due to the release of the most recent issue of Episteme, a Social Epistemology journal that just happens to be all about Conspiracy Theories. Devouring it as I type. More when I get the chance (the internet is not particularly speedy here in Opunake).
Narrative
I’m a part-time part-time writer of fiction and I used to maintain a second blog about the world of struggling with the inner muse. Well, no more. I’m actually writing more fiction than I have for a while, but it’s purpose is not for general readership and I no longer see the point of having a blog about something that very few people know about. I’ve added in all the posts from ‘It’s All A Narrative Structure, Dammit!’ to this site and you’ll note a whole host of tags in the cloud suffixed with ‘(N).’ Those are all the ‘Narrative…’ tags.You are warned.Â
Last Christmas…
You gave me your books and the very next day they stole them away…Ah, Yuletide, or whatever you want to call it. A time of precious memories. Like having my laptop bag (sans laptop) stolen last year with a selection of rather good, rather new, rather expensive to replace library books.Well, this year that won’t happen. My actual reading material spans from the mundane (Simon Blackburn on Reliabilism) to the locally exotic (a book on strange and ‘inexplicable’ things in New Zealand) with some good fiction inbetween (‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell and ‘The Space Machine’ by Christopher Priest to name but two). I have fourteen books in my bag and I plan to read at least half of them in the next week, if not more.Which is my way of saying that I’m off for a little while. Possibly until the 27th but you might want to set your alarms to mid-January as I have parts of the country to see and little hope of internet access whilst I’m there.Be seeing you.Â