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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs a...

Michael Shermer

Discussion: 2011-Jul-Aug-Sep

Why we're reading this: July 11, 2011
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2011-Jul-Aug-Sep

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* September 2011
By Tiffany , WristStrong · 1 post · 40 views

last updated Sep 30, 2011 04:28PM

* August 2011
By Tiffany , WristStrong · 1 post · 39 views

last updated Aug 19, 2011 05:37PM

What Members Thought

Dec 01, 2015 Andy rated it it was ok

This was a disappointment. There is some good content, but that is mostly unoriginal and can be found in better books about cognitive biases, reality-testing, etc.

Shermer does admit that he has biases, and I give him credit for that. And he concludes the book by saying we need to do a better job not just teaching science facts but also teaching the scientific process. I agree with that, but the scientific method is explained only at the end of the book. This is a shame, because it would be good This was a disappointment. There is some good content, but that is mostly unoriginal and can be found in better books about cognitive biases, reality-testing, etc.

Shermer does admit that he has biases, and I give him credit for that. And he concludes the book by saying we need to do a better job not just teaching science facts but also teaching the scientific process. I agree with that, but the scientific method is explained only at the end of the book. This is a shame, because it would be good to explain what the rational standard for "truth" is before bashing people for what they believe.

As he points out, not many people understand the scientific method, and it is not used in the news media much. So most of the people who agree with him, as well as most people who disagree with him on whatever issue, presumably hold their beliefs for the "wrong" reasons. For example, with 9/11, how many people have studied the engineering reports that debunk the conspiracy theorists? Shermer questions why the conspiracy theorists believe X, but he doesn't question why everyone else believes Y. Yet, if he were being scientifically rigorous and unbiased about trying to understand why people believe what they believe, then that would be the critical question. [Before I get silly comments, I'm not saying the conspiracy theorists are right!]

Being objective is incredibly difficult. As he recounts, even Galileo was stubbornly wrong on some issues. So it's not possible for every citizen to fact-check everything. But it's reasonable to ask a self-styled skeptic writing a book about biased beliefs to try to be unbiased on the topics he's discussing.

The most troublesome aspect of Shermer's failure to be unbiased is when he is talking about politics. The author argues for reality over ideology, but doesn't do much reality-testing on political issues and makes absurd libertarian pronouncements (market capitalism has never failed!). It would have been nice, instead of blah blah about conservatives and liberals, to look at nations or states or school districts that function well on objective measures and then illustrate with real examples how evidence-based policy-making works better than ideology.

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