Navigating through a world full of nonsense

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Dr Steven Novella and others (2018)

The world around us is steeped in nonsensical ideas, and always has been.  Over the last few centuries science has made some headway against absurd beliefs, establishing a solid corpus of actual knowledge, with spectacular results in terms of technological progress.  Yet it has been a hard slog, resisted at every step by the forces of superstition and foolishness, and it can still be a struggle for an individual -- even an educated and rational individual -- to reach a genuine understanding of what's true and what isn't.

Why is this?  The human brain, like everything evolution produces, is optimized for survival and reproduction under the primitive conditions in which it evolved.  It is not optimized for logical thinking, nor for accurately understanding the world around it, though it has developed some capacity for such things as a by-product of its increased general intelligence.  But those abilities don't come naturally to it -- they need to be learned, and part of that is learning to recognize the shortcomings we have.

The book starts out with an overview of those shortcomings -- why we are not as good at accurately understanding the world, or even at perceiving it, as we believe we are.  Our sensory data (sight, hearing, and so on) come with a lot of gaps which the brain fills in based on expectation, past experience, and whatever ideas are floating around in the local culture.  Thus people constantly mistake airplane lights or the planet Venus for flying saucers, even seeing details of their appearance which are not actually there, or assign humanoid or animal forms to random shadows or other inanimate phenomena.  Our memories are patchy and selective, and prone to a kind of editing after the fact; what we remember is mostly not raw experiences but how we processed and interpreted them.  We have a strong bias toward interpreting the world in terms of conscious agents doing things on purpose, skewing our view of what in fact are random events.

The next section discusses our susceptibility to various kinds of faulty arguments and ways of thinking, including confirmation bias, cherry-picking data to support a preferred conclusion, failure to recognize coincidence when we see it, and many subtler types of error.

The book then covers numerous specific mistaken ideas and claims through the years, explaining how we know they are, in fact, mistaken (or in a few cases, outright fraud).  Chapters are allocated to psychic powers, perpetual-motion machines, global-warming denialism, popular misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, "intelligent design" (thinly-disguised creationism), N-rays, ghosts, naturopathy, exorcism, and many more.  A few of these errors, such as N-rays, were created and cultivated by scientists themselves -- and there's a lesson there.  One of the reasons why science is the only "way of knowing" about the universe that actually works, is that it assumes scientists have biases just like everyone else, and it requires specific, stringent procedures to ensure that experimenters' own biases and beliefs do not taint the results of their experiments.  On occasions when these precautions are not strictly followed, experiments can yield worthless results.  The essence of science is in its processes, and in the requirement that any experiment be described in enough detail that other scientists can do it themselves and see whether they get the some result -- this is how the claims about N-rays were ultimately debunked.

There is a shorter section on media misreporting about science, which is a huge problem.  Most MSM articles about science are written by people with almost no understanding of the subject, and sensationalize new findings to maximize readership (this is why almost every new discovery is described as overturning our understanding of evolution or astronomy or whatever, when in fact it does no such thing).  A final chapter discusses raising children to be skeptical and open-minded, knowing how to distinguish sense from nonsense on their own.

For most of history human progress was glacially slow, with the mind suffocated by tradition, religion, superstition, and vast ignorance.  There were occasional glimmers of evidence-based thinking -- in ancient Babylon, the Hellenistic Greek world, the medieval Middle East -- and these made some impressive discoveries, but were eventually snuffed out as the darkness descended again.  Then, just a mere few centuries ago, the principles of real science -- the tools for developing a logical, testable understanding of the world based on hard evidence -- became firmly established, and science began moving forward as a systematic enterprise.  The result has been a massive explosion of technological progress -- steam power, electricity, flight, radio, modern vaccines, antibiotics, the doubling of the average human life-span, food security such as humanity had never known before, space probes, the computer revolution, and the internet.  It's important to understand how this was achieved, because those forces of darkness, people with no understanding of or respect for science, still mentally trapped in outdated world-views and non-evidence-based quackery of various kinds, are still out there, eager to attack science and stop progress in its tracks or even drag us backwards.  This book will help you to know them when you see them, and understand exactly why they're wrong.