The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer - Part 6

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 153

  June 2, 2017 

Book 45 - The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and God
to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs
and Reinforce them as Truths
Michael Shermer (2011)
 Part 6 - pages 280-344
Reading Time - 1 hour

Two last chapters.... Geographies of Belief. A cute story about Christopher Columbus and how he was really convinced he had discovered a cross-Atlantic route to India even thought nothing in the New World remotely resembled India. His belief shaped how he saw the world. Basic point is we are not as rational as we like to think (we are not Mr. Spock). The author argues that the only way to avoid the pitfalls of our highly non-rational brain is science.

There is a final chapter on Cosmologies of Belief - we start back with Galileo and how he was trying to get people to accept the helio-centric vision of the solar system. And then a bunch of stories about other astronomers... it was a bit of a hard slog... even though I like astronomy.

His final thoughts are this... science has a null hypothesis. Basically... we formulate a hypothesis and assume it is false. The evidence has to satisfy us to 95-99% certainty. The burden is on people to prove something... not to disprove it. Fine... but I really think this could have all been said in an essay not a massive tome like this book. I probably should have stopped reading after the first chapter but I kept hoping that I'd get something out of it. Did I? I suppose.... the conservative/liberal moral values chart was helpful. Glad to say I am DONE with this book. And I will leave Michael Shermer to his hobby horse. He kept referencing Skeptic Magazine (which he publishes) and kept referring to talks he's given and YouTube videos he's done. All well and good but after a while it got a bit tedious. And this is from me, a scientist.