PLEASE REMEMBER I HAVE A FAQ POST NOW AND THANK YOU FOR LEAVING A COMMENT IF YOU'RE READING! LOVE AND THANKS TO ALL MY READERS!
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney
Details: Copyright 2013, Gotham Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "The MISCONCEPTION: YOU ARE A RATIONAL, LOGICAL BEING WHO SEES THE WORLD AS IT REALLY IS.
The TRUTH: YOU ARE AS DELUDED AS THE REST OF US, BUT THAT'S OKAY-- IT KEEPS YOU SANE.
We don't really know why we act the way we do, choose the things we choose, or think the thoughts we think. David McRaney, author of You Are Not So Smart, is back with even more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking and how we succumb to them both every day.
You Are Not So Smart addressed a wide range of topics, including Confirmation Bias, Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty, and Confabulation, to reveal all the lies we tell ourselves about our behavior. In You Are Now Less Dumb, McRaney returns with more in-depth analysis of our psychological foibles, unraveling topics such as the Misattribution of Arousal, the Halo Effect, the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and more. He exposes the truth behind why money can't buy happiness- at least after a certain point- why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and tips on how to avoid being tricked by the stories we tell ourselves. With elements of popular science and psychology infused with humor and wit, David McRaney is here to prove yet again that we don't have it all figured out. "
Why I Wanted to Read It: This popped up on a list of recommendations and I liked the idea of the book.
How I Liked It: CONTENT WARNING! BOOK CONTAINS RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, AND ABLEISM (INCLUDING UNCENSORED SLURS) AND THE REVIEW MENTIONS THESE. PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.
So recently I've been exploring the idea that maybe I'm looking at books (and subsequently writing these reviews) with too much of a bias in that I'm rating the book through my own experience with whatever subject (that beginners to said subject) may not have. By this I mean that a book I personally might not find useful still might actually be of use to a newcomer/beginner. I've been trying to check that lens, but also balance the fact that sometimes? A book is just bad and not really of use to anyone, regardless of their knowledge (or lack there of) of something.
But first, meet David McRaney! This is the first I'm hearing of him or his work, but apparently this book was a sequel to a similar book he wrote, You Are Not So Smart about other logical fallacies and flawed ways of thinking one might not realize. This particular book has seventeen different logical fallacies and purports to define them, explain why they exist, and how they creep into our thinking (or "your" thinking as the author puts it; more on that in a bit).
This honestly sounds like a great idea. But the big problem is the author's approach. For one, he's not exactly neutrally defining these fallacies.
Deindividuation
THE MISCONCEPTION: People who riot and loot are scum who were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent.
THE TRUTH: Under the right conditions, you are prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into hive mind. (pg 213)
(That's not loaded at all!)
For two, several of his examples are flawed, he uses a lot of "research" that sounds prime for debunking or at least a better interpretation, and removes all relativity or nuance (we'll get to how flawed a concept like "attractiveness" being treated as universal truth is later).
But third and most importantly? The author's voice is intensely insufferable. He is, presumably, a human being with a brain full of the same logical flaws as he describes. And yet the entire book is a smug, superior "you" as in (wait for it!) "You are now less dumb." While maybe some find this charming or funny, this attitude combined with his smug confidence that this book will change your life because how could it not, is... well, not exactly leaving one open to the information he might be trying to impart.
You assume that you are intelligent, capable, rational, and full of the same glorious reason that invented calculus and ginger snaps. You were born with a chip on your shoulder, and you've grown into a sort of undeserved confidence over the years. It's a human foible that comes in many flavors, and I'm assuming you are human. If you are a hyperintelligent dog, a member of the alien race, or a robot historian from our future, I apologize; please move on to the first chapter. If not, proceed toward your epiphany. (pg 1)
Like many books I've reviewed recently, it's important to remember the time period in which this book was published. This is coming directly after Obama's first term, rife with the rise of the TEA Party and a fractious, strange mood as right-wing media scared and collected more viewers, neoliberals like the Obama administration tried completely unsuccessfully to placate a raging right wing forest fire, and social media giants became both bigger and more unhinged as they all but abandoned moderation of online radicalization. So it would seem that a book like this would be a natural choice.
And yet the author makes so many of the same "both sides" fallacies in what I assume is an effort to make this "non-political" that it's disingenuous and frankly absurd.
The author tells the story about Ronald Reagan and a completely false story he told about a Chicago woman while running for President in 1976. This is the origin of the "Welfare Queen" myth, and in the decades since, the Cadillac-driving, eight-named woman was proven to be nothing other than a complete fabrication. She didn't exist at all, and yet was used not only as way to cut social services funding, but to stir up white resentment about Black citizens (and thus mobilize the vote based on racist fears and resentments).
Despite the debunking and the passage of time, the story [about Reagan's racist "welfare queen" myth] is still alive. The imaginary lady who Scrooge McDives into a vault of food stamps between naps while hardworking Americans struggle still appears every day on the Internet The mimetic staying power of the narrative is impressive, and stories like this often provide one of the main foundations for the backfire effect. Psychologists call them narrative scripts, stories that tell you what you want to hear, stories that confirm your beliefs and give you permission to continue feeling as you already do. If believing in welfare queens protects your ideology, you accept it and move on. You might find Reagan's anecdote repugnant or risible, but you've accepted without question a similar anecdote about pharmaceutical companies blocking researching, or unwarranted police searches, or the health benefits of chocolate. You've watched a documentary about the evils of...something you dislike, and you probably loved it. For every Michael Moore documentary passed around as the truth there is an anti-Michael Moore documentary with its own proponents trying to convince you their version of the truth is the better choice. (pg 146)
A couple things here: for one, the author never addresses the racism of Reagan's myth which given that it was a crucial part, is a very strange, irresponsible choice. For two, this is a demonstrable thing we know is false. That woman never existed, and yet Reagan claimed she was a real person. Whereas an imaginary "counterpoint", supposedly to the "opposite" political view of a Reagan/racist myth supporter, a "similar anecdote" overlooks that pharmaceutical companies actually do block research (and actually there's right-wing skepticism of pharmaceutical companies, although for usually anti-vaccination reasons), there are definitely unwarranted police searches (and I don't have to tell you that in 2023), and, well, there are health benefits to chocolate. As to Michael Moore, there's both facts and myths in his documentaries. It's not a matter of right versus left, it's a matter of objective truth versus lies/myths. And by presenting these as a matter of your opinion, the author reduces facts to a matter of opinion as well, a logical fallacy of his very own (the Middleground Fallacy).
Speaking of which:
Flash-forward to 2011, and you have Fox News and MSNBC battling for cable journalism territory, both promising a viewpoint that will never challenge the beliefs of a certain portion of the audience. Biased assimilation guaranteed. (pg 151)
Do I think MSNBC attempted to use the same product model as Fox, more or less? Sure. But that's considerably more difficult for liberals/neo-liberals? Yeah. And so trying to compare the two, particularly when one (particularly in 2011) had a clearly higher pull is another false equivalency? Definitely.
Geoffrey Munro and Peter Ditto concocted a series of fake scientific studies in 1997. One set of studies said homosexuality was normal and natural. They then separated subjects into two groups. One group said they believed homosexuality was a mental illness, and the other did not. Each group then read the fake studies full of pretend facts and figures suggesting that their worldview was wrong. On either side of the issue, after reading studies that did not support their beliefs, most people didn't report an epiphany, a realization that they'd been wrong all those years. Instead, they said the issue was something science couldn't understand. When asked about the topics later on, such as spanking or astrology, these same people said they no longer trusted research to determine the truth. Rather than shed their belief and face facts, they rejected science altogether. (pg 151)
AND THESE VIEWPOINTS ARE BOTH THE SAME, RIGHT? Honestly, why even cite this? Homosexuality was dropped from the DSM in the 1970s, long before this study, which itself was done over a decade and a half before this book's publication. One worldview is definitely, scientifically proven to be wrong. And entertaining both world views as the same causes grievous harm to a marginalized group.
So despite the author's insufferable tone, and spotty to downright dangerously incorrect claims, is my bias showing? I'm pretty well-versed in logical fallacies as I've tried to be and continue to try to be as a person, so I was familiar with all the ones he names in this book. Would this be a good book for someone with no experience in logical fallacies? Would this be a good book for someone for whom all of this is brand new?
Given the outright wrong information in places and the author's overall tone, I don't think so. If I find the tone off-putting as someone who is familiar with this topic, I can only imagine how jarring, and unpleasant it would be for someone trying to sort this all out for the first time.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if you're experienced with the subject or a beginner: the book's just not worth it.
Notable:
At the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, right around the time the Hula-Hoop was invented, three men began a conversation that would drag each into the depths of madness. Real madness, the kind that earns prescriptions. (pg 17)
Sometimes I struggle to explain to people the concept of casual ableism around mental illness and how entrenched it is in our culture. Then I see something like this and go "Oh, yeah."
________________________________________
Consider this: Elizabeth burst into flame while trying on a new bra. Elizabeth burst into flame while trying on a new bra after being cursed by an angry gypsy whose foot Elizabeth accidentally ran over with a shopping card on the way to the dressing room. (pg 24 and 25)
Really? In 2013? Not an angry sorceress? But literally a racial slur, and going for the Romani curse sterotype?
________________________________________
At times, the author stumbles into talking about feminism and it doesn't go well.
The classic example of the conjunction fallacy comes from the work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnerman, the great pioneers of cognitive bias research, who in 1982 presented a puzzle I will showcase here in story form: Linda grew up in San Francisco, and while other girls played with dolls, she read philosophy books. She was always the kind of child who would stomp and snort when she didn't get her way, and her parents had a hard time teaching her not to talk back. She graduated from high school a year early and was accepted to Harvard, where she received a degree in philosophy. Before entering the workforce, Linda spent some time in the Peace Corps helping women gain access to health care in and around the Congo region of the continent of Africa. Unmarried, with no children, she is now back in the United States working on a Ph.D. in political science. Which is more likely? Linda works at a bank, or Linda works at a bank and writes for a feminism blog? This might blow your mind, but the answer is that it is much more likely Linda just works at a bank. All that extra information frames the character of Linda in a way that makes it seem to many people she is a feminist, but that doesn't change the raw statistical truth that a person is more likely to have only one trait out of a bazillion than they are to have two. If I had asked, "Is it more likely Linda is a feminist or Linda is a NASCAR driver?" you would be correct to assume that, based on what you know, Linda prefers studying equality more than she does gear ratios. But that's not what I asked. Simply put, there are many, many more people in this world who work at banks than there are people who work at banks and also write for feminism blogs. In fact, the more possibilities, the more improbable their combination becomes compared with just a single trait. It is very unlikely that Linda works at a bank, runs a feminism blog, votes Democratic, lives in California, donates to the World Wildlife Fund, and enjoys Tori Amos. When you look back on the story of Linda, the chances that any of one of these facts is true is pretty high, but the chances that any two of them are true about the same person is much less likely, and any three lesser still, ans so on. It sure doesn't seem that way, though, does it? That's your narrative bias at work, supported by the conjunction fallacy and held together with the representativeness heuristic, or your tendency to ignore odds and instead judge the likelihood of something based on how similar an example is to an imagined archetype. (pgs 25 and 26)
...A lot to unpack, but okay, I've noticed Tori Amos as a feminist stereotype before, by a feminist-hater/general misogynist. WHAT IS WITH THIS STEREOTYPE. Is it because Amos co-founded RAINN, a sexual assault advocacy group? Is it just because she's a female singer that's popular? Do they get her confused with vocal, self-identified feminists? Particularly given the time period in which she first became famous? What's the story here with why people who are not feminists/don't know what feminism is keep dragging Tori Amos into their stereotype of feminism?
If a Republican champions a Democrat's plan, or if a dog marries a cat, a common defense mechanism to say that the very act itself transforms the actor into a nonmember of that club. If a feminist wants to be a stay-at-home mom, is she still a feminist? Some say no; some say yes. (pg 181)
It's probably a great time for you to stop talking about feminism.
________________________________________
There are about a hundred accounts in the medical literature of people displaying what is now known as Cotard's delusion. It is also sometimes known, unsettlingly, as walking corpse syndrome. If you were to develop Cotard's delusion you might look in the mirror and find your reflection suspicious, or you might cease to feel that the heartbeat in your chest was yours, or you might think parts of your body were rotting away. In the most extreme cases, you might think you'd become a ghost and decide you no longer needed food. One of Cotard's patients died of starvation. (pg 30)
This sounded strange to me. Wouldn't your natural instincts kick in and you'd eat something to stay alive? Turns out that while yes, Cotard's Syndrome is an extremely rare mental disorder (that does not appear in the DSM, incidentally), there did appear to be one case, a "Mademoiselle X" (in a very sketchy account) that supposedly died from that reason.
I'm having trouble believing this. I think it was not reported accurately at the time, facts got fluffed over time, and people (like the author) didn't want to question the account scientifically.
________________________________________
Still, compared to your loinclothed cousins from antiquity, you live in an amazing time. You probably carry a supercomputer in your pocket, and unlike most of your ancestors, you'll probably never worry about food or shelter.(pg 48)
Wow, he actually wrote that last part even that soon after the Great Recession.
________________________________________
Yet when we look back on the ancients, it's easy to laugh at their silly assumptions. From gods in burning chariots to elves making cookies in trees, your ancestors believed in all sorts of things, thanks to the same faulty reasoning you deal with today. (pg 50)
I mean, kudos for not saying "sky daddy", I suppose.
________________________________________
Your civilization may dance at the same time every year to bring the rains so that your harvest grows tall and bountiful, but that doesn't mean your dancing has anything to do with growth of crops. Your team may gather and pray super hard before every game, but that doesn't mean you won the state championship because you persuaded an all-knowing deity to provide your team with strength against your pagan kickball rivals. Despite the usefulness of automatically coming to such conclusions, that way of thinking is still fallacious. Erring on the side of caution is still the best bet in most situations, so that's the factory setting for your whole species. (pgs 76 and 77)
Just one of the many original meanings of Pagan, although given the author's remark about "gods in burning chariots" maybe he does mean that.
________________________________________
What makes someone "attractive"? Even "conventional attractiveness" is a pretty relative concept. Not to this author, apparently, however.
When a director wants to generate a positive emotion in relation to a character, it really helps to make that person tall. (pg 87)
The author then goes at length to describe how much more money tall actors make, and directors digging trenches for other actors so the lead appears taller and so on and so forth and I just feel that's still a pretty relative statement. What about child actors? Do actresses have to be taller too, what role does gender play? (Not to be a feminist, of course).
Beautiful people seem more intelligent, strong people seem nobler, friendly people seem more trustworthy, and so on. When they fall short, you forgive and defend them, sometimes unconsciously. (pg 89)
Beautiful is such a highly subjective term. So is "friendly", frankly.
Regardless of why, people living in the same era and culture tend to agree upon standards of beauty, and those standards unconsciously influence other judgments. (pg 89)
Do they, though?
He describes a 1972 study.
Again, all the subjects saw was the person's face. The more attractive the person, the more the subjects rated the likelihood of her happiness, and the more joy they assumed the person felt in her marriage, job, and experience as a parent. The more beautiful the person in the photo, the more likely the subjects said it was that the person worked in a high-status career.
This tendency of the halo effect to cause physical attractiveness to color assumptions about everything else about a person sets up two scenarios, said Dion, Berscheid, and Walster. One, beautiful people don't just have the advantage of beauty, but you treat them as if they have a host of other presumed advantages that compound that advantage. And two, after years of walking through life receiving treatment as though they possess the personality traits we like to see in others, beautiful people tend to believe and act as though they truly possess those attributes. Pretty people believe they are kind, smart, decent, and whatever else the halo effect produces in the eyes of their audience-- whether or not those things are true. (pg 90)
ATTRACTIVENESS IS SO SUBJECTIVE HOW ON EARTH WOULD THIS EVEN WORK?
A similar study, conducted by Margaret Clifford and Elaine Walster in 1973, provided more than five hundred fifth-grade teachers with files on new students that included information on their scholastic aptitude, a report card, and a photograph. The teachers believed they were helping the school determine the thoroughness and utility of their school's record-keeping system Each file was identical, and the report cards showed scores well above the expected average. The only difference was the photo each teacher received. In a survey beforehand, twenty teachers rated a group of photographs of fifth-grade students on a scale of physical attractiveness. Out of those, researchers selected twelve photos, the three most attractive boys and the three most attractive girls along with the three most unattractive of each. In their survey, the psychologists asked another group of teachers to use the materials provided to come up with an estimate of each child's IQ, his social standing with his peers, the child's parents' attitude toward school, and the student's chances of dropping out. Remember, the information is the same for each teacher; only the photo differed. What do you think they said? The results fell right in line with what psychologists expect from the halo effect. The more attractive the student, the higher the teacher estimated his IQ, the higher they rated the likelihood his parents would be involved in his education, the better-liked the student would be with friends, and the lower they estimated the chances the child would drop out. When asked to comment on their ratings, the teachers rarely mentioned the child's appearance. (pgs 91 or 92)
I'm going to put aside for a moment the easy joke on the author's lazy writing: people who find elementary school children "attractive" should be getting help from a professional therapist and not be around children. That cheap shot on language out of the way, I think what the author meant was "conventionally cute", and that's incredibly subjective. Is the kid with missing front teeth look adorable? Advertising might think so when it needs a cute kid to sell a product, but child beauty pageants dictate the child wear false teeth or a "flipper" to appear presentable. Would a chubby kid seem cute and sweet or would a teacher think they needed to monitor what they ate? What about race and white beauty standards? What race were the teachers (on top of everything else, this would've been when teaching to an integrated classroom would still be a relatively new concept, particularly depending on where you lived) and what race were the students? How did that factor in?
This encompasses so much of what's wrong with the book.
And there's this aside:
The teachers who believed the child was disturbed, disabled, or retarded graded him much more harshly than those who received no initial label and thus had no expectations. (pg 97)
Quick note, did the author use "retarded" because that word was still acceptable in the 1970s when the study was done, or was he just lazy/ignorant of the word's (at best) outdatedness in 2013?
Don't put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good.(pg 99)
One last time, BEAUTY IS SUBJECTIVE. That said, I don't entirely disagree with the rest of it, particularly the last line.
________________________________________
This is why it's so vitally important for a business to control its image and stay vigilant about what the public is saying about it both in private and in the echo chamber of the World Wide Web. (pg 98)
I'm kind of fascinated by someone still calling in the World Wide Web in the new century at all, let alone thirteen years in. Also, if your internet experience is an echo chamber, that's at least somewhat on you.
________________________________________
This is what a favorite blog might call "SIGNS THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2013":
If, like those in the study, you persevere through a challenge-- be it remodeling a kitchen yourself or learning how to dance the Dougie-- that glowing feeling of becoming wiser, that buoyant sense of self-expansion, will be partially misattributed to the presence of the other person. (pg 122)
You can learn a lot about dealing with loss from a video game called FarmVille.
You have probably heard of this game. In 2010 one in five Facebook users had a FarmVille account. The barrage of updates generated by the game annoying other users so much it forced the social network to change how users sent messages. At its peak, 84 million people played it, a number greater than the population of Italy. (pg 225)
I'd never played it, but until I read this, I had forgotten that FarmVille existed. Maybe you did, too.
________________________________________
In one study, they placed women in cubicles. To make physical attraction less of a factor, everyone in the study was female. (pg 135)
I just... why.
________________________________________
As the Internet becomes simpler to search and more broadly accessed, it becomes easier to retreat to a safe haven of disparaging evidence. Perhaps that's why polls show that, in the United States, belief in evolution has remained at about 39 percent since the 1980s, even as more evidence is added daily to the mountain already available online. It's also a likely culprit behind the sharp drop in the belief in global warming, going from 77 percent acceptance in the United States in 2006 to 67 percent acceptance in 2012, Without a doubt, the backfire effect is also making it difficult to snuff out the thriving antivaccination movement, despite millions of dollars in research indicating that vaccines are safe. The persistent efforts of antivaccination activists in the face of evidence of vaccines' validity caused the worst outbreak of whooping cough in seventy years in 2012, according to Forbes. (pgs 147 and 148)
Absolutely horrifying, and it's not said anywhere near enough that Mark Zuckerberg and those like him have blood on their hands. Years and years and years of complete lack of moderation and factchecking and that being more or less built into the model of modern social media is why we have the mess of it we do in 2023.
________________________________________
What should be evident from the studies on the backfire effect is you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel even surer of his position than before you started the debate. As he matches your fervor, the same thing happens in your skull. The backfire effect pushes both of you deeper into your original beliefs. (pg 149)
I both agree and disagree with this. It depends on your definition of "win". Is it a win to get the other person to stop talking? Or to dogpile them? I've been extremely fortunate enough to see at least a couple times that someone did change their minds and even went back to the original thread to talk about it, usually after a period away.
It also depends on how you go into the conversation. Again, these social media models (with no human moderation on a broad level) are built for antagonism, but if both parties go in respectfully, change can be made. Also, even if one party is just trolling and/or not listening, those witnessing the arguments can have their minds changed. It's happened to me witnessing arguments/debates on a number of subjects. Again, it's a nuanced concept.
________________________________________
One of the best things about owning a brain is how you often seem to phase out of normalcy and briefly see your culture with a weirdly objective frame of mind. At some point every child realizes money is made up of slips of paper with no intrinsic value, and wonders why aloud. So, too, will children ask adults what's up with shaking hands, or putting your fork on one side of the plate, or saying "Bless you" after a sneeze. Parents apply the glue that holds a culture together when explaining to a child that his socks must match, or that punctuality is paramount, or that picking his nose in public is a terrible habit. When a parent tells a boy he shouldn't play with dolls, or a girl to wait for a boy to ask her to the prom they are enforcing norms. When a kid asks, "But, why?" she is rightfully bringing to the attention of the adult world that all this stuff is just made up and mostly arbitrary nonsense often clung to for some long-forgotten reason. (pgs 159 and 160)
Careful, you're skirting close to feminism (complete with Tori Amos?) with deciding some of that is mostly arbitrary nonsense.
________________________________________
As the psychologist Leaf Van Boven pointed out in a study published in 2000, pluralistic ignorance doesn't always stall change; it can also lead people to be more politically correct. (pg 167)
Can we please, please put down "politically correct". Especially when what you mean is "socially progressive" or even "progressive". Using a reactionary nonsense term like that was totally unnecessary in 2013 and we know damn well it'd be the racistly misappropriated "woke" in 2023. ________________________________________
Sociologists Damon Centola, Robb Willer, and Michael Macy applied game theory to this concept, plugging data into computer models, and shows that unpopular norms are likely to pop up in just about any human social situation in which there is a palpable fear of retribution. [...] They point out that the literal witch hunts of the early American colonies and the metaphorical witch hunts of the McCarthy era share similarities with the bizarre irony of closeted homosexual men committing acts motivated by homophobia. Politicians known for their antigay legislation have boggled the minds of their constituents by getting caught in gay sex scandals. You might wonder why someone who is homosexual would work so hard to make it difficult to be homosexual, but Centola, Willer, and Macy say it is pretty simple. One of the common strategies to avoid embarrassment and punishment for disagreeing with a norm is actively to enforce it.
[...]
If being openly gay is risky, then people with homosexual feelings may beat up others who are openly homosexual, or try to pass laws that suppress gay rights. (pgs 170 and 171)
Just say "gay", not "homosexual".
________________________________________
Are you a grown man who loves My Little Pony? My friend, you're a Google search away from discovering millions of other Bronies like you. (pg 176)
No, you can be just fine with being a grown man who loves My Little Pony. You don't have to have a special term for it to preserve your (fragile) masculinity, and you don't need to belong to a rather troublesome group with some really unfortunate associations (look that up at your own risk). Then again, this was 2013, but still.
________________________________________
The name ["no true Scotsman"] comes from philosopher Antony Flew. He wrote a book in 1975 called Thinking about Thinking, in which he describes a man from Scotland reading about a terrible sex crime in England. The Scotsman proclaims, "No Scotsman would do such a thing." Then, the next day, he reads about an even worse sex crime occurring in Scotland, and he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing." Our Scottish friend would rather not believe his Scottish brothers and sisters could be so indecent and cruel, so he creates a fantasy definition that excludes bad people from being like him. Now he can continue to be in a group that does no wrong. You see the problem here? (pg 179)
And now you know the rest of the story!
________________________________________
Social media confound the issue. You are a public relations masterpiece. Not only are you free to create alternate selves for forums, websites, and other digital watering holes, but from one social media service to the next, you control the output of your persona. The clever tweets, the Instagrams of your delectable triumphs with the oven and mixing bowl, the funny meme you send out into the firmament that you check back on for comments, the new thing you own, the new place you visited-- you tell a story of who you want to be. They satisfy something. Is anyone clicking on all these links? Is anyone smirking at this video? (pg 193)
An interesting take on social media, but not the best I'd seen lately.
________________________________________
In a political debate, you feel that the other side just doesn't get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did, they wouldn't think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You don't need to hear them elaborate on it because you already know it better than they do. So each side believes it understands the other side better than the other side understands both its opponents and itself. (pg 198)
Again, yes and no. Sometimes you do understand the argument because maybe you once held it yourself. But then again, maybe you only think you understand their argument because you once held it yourself.
________________________________________
When things are going your way, you have no problem calling attention to your own contributions to good fortune. If you win a game, or get promoted, or make an excellent grade, you tend to attribute that success to your skills, talent, effort, and preparation. If you fail, though, or get passed over, you have a habit of looking for something outside yourself to blame- a mean boss, a crappy team, a confusing teacher- whatever it takes to keep yourself from blame. This self-serving bias provides you with credit for all the things in life that worked out in your favor, and it absolves you of responsibility for those times you fell short. The self-serving bias makes it difficult for you to acknowledge the help of others, or luck, or an unfair advantage. It isn't a malicious defect of your personality; it's just your brain's way of framing things so that you don't stop moving forward. If you fail the tests that would have made you a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or dog groomer, you protect your ego by noticing all the factors in between you and your goals. That way, you can try again with the gumption and certainty required to accomplish such difficult objectives. (pg 259)
Sir, I'd like to introduce you to a little thing called chronic depression. If nothing else, it's an excellent innoculator apparently against this fallacy (not recommended).
________________________________________
The book ends on a somewhat uplifting note, kind of.
Throughout human history there have been periods in which people bore tremendous burdens and slogged through what seemed like insurmountable misery. From concentrations camps to death marches, to plagues and wars, people who share the same basic mind as you have suffered and survived horrific events. Likewise, you share something amazing with those who live daily under the yoke of terrible oppression. Should you be plucked from your cozy place in this world and assume their plight, should your will be tested at the intensity of so many before you, one constant is sure: You will be resilient. You won't give up. (pg 274)
________________________________________
Growing up in the Deep South, you meet plenty of homegrown philosophers and armchair psychologists who refuse to stay in their homes or their chairs. In every gas station, every diner, at every coffee break, they stand around telling you how it is. There is a truck stop where I've bought breakfast many times, and old men sit inside at hand-me-down fast-food tables to chew on biscuits and complain about politicians. Sometime back, someone hung a sign above them that reads, HUNTERS, FISHERMEN AND OTHER LIARS GATHER HERE. That's true. The fact that they announce it in a factory-produced, flame-engraved letters on a wooden sign is a precious thing to me. Southerners love bullshittery, and they are masters of it. It's the first thing a Southerner notices when traveling far from home. Yankees seem quaintly unaware of how terrible they are at bullshitting. (pg 276)
I don't know. The South has given us some absolutely amazing storytellers, from Zora Neale Hurston to Truman Capote to Rick Bragg.
But smugly bring "Yankees" into it and I might be tempted to point out a certain sect in the South was so good at bullshitting you've got people who still believe a treason rag is the sign of a true "patriot" over a century and a half after their side lost spectacularly. Just saying.
Final Grade: D
No comments:
Post a Comment