Goodreads | Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (Paperback) by Michael Shermer

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Lena rated it:

07/26/07

bookshelves: non-fiction

Having spent a fair amount of time on my spiritual path believing things that at best had no evidence and at times were quite outrageous, I’ve become very interested in the question that forms the title of this book. A former born-again Christian who is now head of the Skeptic society, Michael Shermer has written a very readable and compelling exploration of the cognitive thinking errors humans regularly make that support belief in ideas that can often be very detrimental to our overall well-...more

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Trevor rated it:

08/18/08

This guy is in Australia at the moment for Science Week and I was thinking of going to see him, but this is not really a week in which I can engage in such optional behaviours – so, I thought I’d get out one of his books instead.

And look, it was very good and if it had been the first book I’d ever read on scepticism (which I think it was written to be) than I really would have been impressed. But it wasn’t the first book I’d read on this subject and so that in itself gave t...more This guy is in Australia at the moment for Science Week and I was thinking of going to see him, but this is not really a week in which I can engage in such optional behaviours – so, I thought I’d get out one of his books instead.

And look, it was very good and if it had been the first book I’d ever read on scepticism (which I think it was written to be) than I really would have been impressed. But it wasn’t the first book I’d read on this subject and so that in itself gave the book a bit of a struggle ahead of itself.

Brookmyre’s latest is also on pretty much the same subject, particularly at the start of this one, but the Brookmyre is a much better book – but then, it is a Brookmyre, even if not a terribly funny Brookmyre. Reading this book actually made me reconsider just how good Brookmyre’s last book actually was.

There was an odd bit towards the end of this one about the Holocaust – and I really struggled with that being in this book. To compare David Irving and the holocaust deniers with Creationists and the deniers of Evolution – I mean, I can see where he is coming from, but really, of the two, Creationists are the much more dangerous, as they are by far considered the more ‘credible’ by a larger part of society. Only someone with virtually no brain at all could deny the holocaust – it is hard to take that view seriously, so I struggled over this being put in the book.

But everyone needs to take Creationism seriously – when the guy with his hand on the big red button calls himself a Creationist and believes in Armageddon, the world really does need to take Creationism more seriously than Holocaust denial.

The start of this book is very well put together – he goes through the logical fallacies that people often make when they believe in such things as alien abduction or spiritualism. Even as an introduction to logical fallacies it is worth reading. In fact, I found most of the book well put together. It is just I have read so much on this stuff and so very little here is ‘new’.

However, there really was a wonderful bit in the middle where he quotes from Dianetics , quotes my mate L. Ron saying that Dianetics is the greatest human discovery since the wheel. I really am going to have to read that book one of these days. Scientology has got to be the funniest religion around. If the point of religion is to make me smile, then really, compared to Scientology (and perhaps the Latter Days) other religions really aren’t trying.

It might be that with this stuff one does tend to go back to the first book one read on the subject – but I still do think that A Physicist’s Guide to Scepticism by Rothman was a much better book.

All the same, this is a book worth reading because it is on a very important topic – while it is still the case that the majority of people in the world believe in ghosts and UFOs there will always be room for yet another book on scepticism. And this one is easy to read and quite comprehensive.

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Jason rated it:

11/07/07

Read in March, 2004

This book seems to hold great promise from the outset. It's a book (as the author would confess) that values reason, science, knowledge and the examination of beliefs. Nothing wrong with that. However, the book seems to ramble on a bit and takes on the feel of the author's personal musings instead of objective examination of the material. A couple of the chapters could be condensed into one chapter that contains more focus and sticks to the topic. For instance, in one chapter Shermer drones on a...more This book seems to hold great promise from the outset. It's a book (as the author would confess) that values reason, science, knowledge and the examination of beliefs. Nothing wrong with that. However, the book seems to ramble on a bit and takes on the feel of the author's personal musings instead of objective examination of the material. A couple of the chapters could be condensed into one chapter that contains more focus and sticks to the topic. For instance, in one chapter Shermer drones on about the diff. aspects of creation-science and real science which is testable. This is great except he lists a myriad of arguments in brief. The only way you could do anything worthwhile with the material intellectually is to dig deeper into other books with more insight on the topic. In other words, you aren't going to reach any conclusions yay or nay with such brief explanations. He discusses holocaust denial in a "part" of the book which is fine except a couple of the chapters once again could be condensed since the later chapter seems to rehash much of what was said before only in greater detail. Lastly, the very last chapter which deals with a Dr. Tipler and his fantasy-like Omega Point theory is superfluous. This is Shermer's personal book review of Tipler's physics work. To put it crudely, who really gives a crap except someone with a vested interest in physics? A short description of the weirdness of Tipler's work would have been sufficient. Also, one other gripe; Shermer seems to portray the personal idea that objective science is good and that theories are subject to change over time-"facts are data". Yet, despite him stating these points I found him more than once claiming evolution as fact. I am not saying that it isn't but am suggesting he should reframe himself to say it's commonly accepted as fact because of such and such testable evidence. Also, Shermer does discuss fringe beliefs somewhat such as; alien abductions, afrocentrism, witch hunts and the like. However, in my opinion he strayed away too much from these interesting topics and went into personal musings about science instead. Anyway, I can see many people giving negative reviews of this book simply because they do not like Shermer's relativistic, hard-science stand. That's no fault of his own though...Finally, I would recommend the book despite its flaws because it is for lack of a better description interesting. It could have been much better but we will have to accept it on merit of the ideas it espouses and not so much for the overall content. ...less

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