Three books to help understand the world today

“Day 12: Looking at the world through sceptical eyes”

The World Today

In the internet age information is plentiful and attention is scarce. Everyone has the means to share their knowledge and insight whether that is well informed or specious.

This is not new. At the very start of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2 we see the personification of rumour telling us:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

(Do take a couple of minutes to read Rumour's opening monologue at Project Gutenburg, immediately below the boiler plate)

Today we have fantastically fast channels for sharing information, insight, rumour and prejudice. Fantastic channels for presenting them all with parity of esteem: Is this snippet I just read true? —– It's the reader's responsibility to make that judgement.

Our brains are equipped with a lot of short cuts that we have learned through our lives – activities that initially need explicit thought get committed to procedural memory (often call “muscle memory”). Driving a car or playing a musical instrument are good examples. Without this ability to proceduralise common actions we wouldn't function as a species.

The problem is that this proceduralisation, the taking of cognitive short cuts, spills over into our evaluation of information that's presented to us. When we hear something that sounds reasonable, our first instinct is to believe it. And this leads on into credulousness and superstition, which are the enemies of reason.

Rolling Back The Enlightenment

We do love to come up with labels. “The Dark Ages” weren't really that dark, and “The age of enlightenment” wasn't really that enlightened, but the time from the 17th to 19th centuries did see the spread of knowledge, of education and of reason. It saw the beginning of the scientific method, of Newtonian mechanics, and progress in literature and music.

This process now seems to have passed it's peak, and we're now regressing to new Dark Ages. Which brings me to three books you should read.

Book 1: “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World”

The author, Francis Wheen, has worked on Private Eye for years. In a series of essays he lays out how conspiracy theories, quackery and general bollocks has come to be mainstream. You think I exaggerate?

Wherever you go, you'll see quackery abounding.

How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World

Book 2: “Bad Science”

Next up, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

Ben teaches you how to read stories about science, particularly medical science. He shows how we have arrived it the use of randomised double blind trials, and how science stories are very often reported: without peer review; with small samples; with only anecdotal evidence; without a control group. He trains your eye in how to skip the lurid headline and first paragraph, and go straight to the method statement.

Given that it is so easy to understand what is valid to report, it is disappointing that so much bad science is promulgated.

Book 3: “Flat Earth News”

Flat Earth News completes our threesome.

Written more in sorrow than in anger, Nick Davies explains modern jounalism to us: “Thou shalt fill the space”.

Pity the modern journalist: fewer people buy newspapers, while they have more pages, they have far more competition for advertising space so the rates are lower, and they often have to populate a news site as well as produce copy. There is no longer space for Woodward and Bernstein, their copy would be 100 times too expensive today. Davies coins the term “Churnalism” to describe the story that is present in all outlets for a number of days, the different outlet all feeding each other. The political “row” is the embodiment of this: every time someone new wades into it, there is more copy.

What do you get when you put them together?

We must stop taking things at face value. Always, always take whatever you read back to its original source, or as closely as possible. Telling your neighbours “I read in the paper that you shouldn't eat <x>“ without checking the source is, today, to join the centuries old practice of spreading rumour.

This post is day 12 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.