The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

Prof. Saad's promise is this book will vaccinate you against "infectious ideas", namely political correctness, postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism and transgender activism. He finds them opposing to his core values: truth and freedom and truth; and core of modern West: freedom of thought and speech, and the scientific method. He wants to

Prof. Saad's promise is this book will vaccinate you against "infectious ideas", namely political correctness, postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism and transgender activism. He finds them opposing to his core values: truth and freedom and truth; and core of modern West: freedom of thought and speech, and the scientific method. He wants to prevent "death of the West by thousand cuts".

Very useful terms prof. Saad has presents in this book is "Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome", describing person's blindness for the evidence that contradicts their worldview or wishful thinking. He defines "But Katie Holmes is taller than Tom Cruise" as a fallacy of discarding some fact based on statistical exceptions.
Another useful concept presented is "Nomological network of cumulative evidence" - way for searching for the facts in uncertain settings full of contradictions. Also, book describes few interesting evolutionary mechanisms and gives lot of useful references and briefly mentions some scientific terms (i.e. transnational analysis, behavior change, elaboration likelihood model, deontological ethics and consequentialism, behavioral immune system, evolutionary epistemology), setting a great starting point for further learning.

While science is mentioned, book is not written in a scientific way. Just the opposite. It misses depth of the arguments, contains enumerable fallacies and implications for the reader to jump to the wrong conclusions. While it is calling for to use reason instead of feelings, it is playing on feelings and framing to make it's point. Book is written to create the polarisation, to antagonize the other side and to make you martyr in prof. Saad's army of ideologists. He's referring to the battle of ideas, but most of the book he's talking about ideologists and trying to get you in his battle of ideologists.

While it's intellectual level is relatively poor, this book is a masterpiece of applied marketing written by the top professional of the field. At the start, prof. Saad gives you a lot of personal information. In reader's eyes, he has to be human and relatable. He continues to create clear "us and them" distinction, with enemies who are endangering reader, reader's family and the whole Western civilization.

Prof. Saad will explain haughtily mention everything he is doing to his reader, but in the context of the other side's misdeeds. He tells you stories about your enemies, with names. He makes the danger FEEL real. He's playing on readers behavioral system, associating the enemy with disease, death and famine. Although he's calling for facts and numbers, he gives mostly evaluations and judgments. He provides the reader with conclusions without the actual discussion.

Most of the book is about ideologists, not ideology. Prof. Saad he tells the story, judges the deeds of person and generalizes the conclusion to the whole ideology person presents. He doesn't make much effort to present the ideology and it's arguments. It's hard to find few sentences before he proceeds with moral evaluation. And don't worry, you'll read the same statement how dangerous the idea is rewritten in more sentences than he'll use to present it. The goal is not to teach the reader something new, the goal is to make reader think of the other side as a disease and pest, to hate it without thinking.

Prof. Saad avoids to elaborate his conclusions. He's calling for science but hand-waves off the idea of multivariate analysis to search for causation. Why try convincing the reader with statistical inference when you can just give him the conclusion and say "science"? He misuses ">"surely" operator> on various places to defend indefensible claims. It's either "common sense", "obvious" or "as clear as existence of Sun". Prof. Saad talks in analogies instead in arguments and jumps to conclusions. Later, I'll mention his wielding of whataboutism.

In the book which calls for science and numbers, prof. Saad has given us the actual numbers on 2 occasions: Republican-Democrat ratio in humanity departments and on Muslim countries and terrorism. He provides no statistical/casual inference and analysis, his non sequitur conclusion should somehow be obvious from the plain numbers. He's framing reader. Only time when multivariate analysis is mentioned, he hand-waves it off.

Interestingly, book is full of hypocrisy. In the introduction, Prof. Saad defends himself from questions why he doesn't attack Israel and Donald Trump - calling them "whataboutism". First time he actually provides the numbers is whataboutism aimed at humanist departments. Funnier case of hypocrisy is whataboutism used on progressives who criticize Christianity but not Islam.
Second and last time prof. Saad actually gives us numbers, he's using statistically insignificant even of terrorism as an argument about Islam, just few pages after introducing "But Katie Holmes is taller than Tom Cruise" fallacy about concluding from outliers.

Prof. Saad attacks the left with Popper's unfalsiability, only to proceed with telling the story how he refused to discuss "close minded old guard professor" who argued against unfalsiability of evolutionary arguments in his own research.
Book is written to discard tons of widely accepted research and top research institutions while making fun of people who don't accept established science. "We have personal anecdotes versus science [...]. By emphasizing the scientific consensus [...], one can reverse this dangerous instantiation of science denialism."
In the same book he's proudly telling the story with his research being discarded from obsolete academic in the same way he's discarding lot of established humanities departments.

Prof. Saad presumes evolutionary objective as a moral position without any reasoning how he jumped from the process that has generated our traits to setting the moral goals. Also, he informs us that there is an evolutionary mechanism behind correlation of running shoes with thick soles and their buyers having the problems with knees. I guess there is the same evolutionary mechanism behind the correlation of buying blood sugar tests and having the diabetes. Occam's razor.
In the same book I've learned that long casual links aren't reliable way of explaining things. I guess it's OK to do it when you hide the biggest part of the chain behind one name.

Book is also trying to ride the wave of US election tensions. While mentioning Trump as the example through the whole book, in "Call to action" chapter he explains how voting for Trump is one of ways people have already approached to solve to the problems in the book.

Although he promised to vaccinate you against mind viruses, prof. Saad has decided to install you a mind virus of his own. With this book he's searching for useful fools willing to sacrifice their personal relationships and careers for his battle. Although he's jelling "science" and writing against decisions based on feelings, he's playing on reader's feelings through the whole book with a goal of recruitment. I excepted much better level of discussion from the intellectual I still respect and follow. I'm thankful for the stuff from the first part of this review.

I will end the review with the quote from the book. "There are many forms of cultural enrichment [...], but cultural and religious values some immigrants bring with them to the West manifestly do not add to our strength. They only sow hatred, intolerance and divisiveness." This is exactly what you're trying to do with this book, my dear professor.