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This will be my first newsletter where I talk about the books I’ve been reading, and honestly, I wish I had started sooner. Reflecting back on it, the following books introduced me to the topics that are often at the forefront of my mind. They were incredibly influential in how I think about things, and they even changed my mind a few times, which is always a fun surprise.
In the following ranked list, I will go through the biggest takeaways from my favorite books of this year and will provide specific insights from them that managed to stick in my memory. Although these books are ranked, the ordering of the list is almost completely arbitrary. I absolutely loved all of these books. But numbers make things more fun. So with that, let’s start with #10.
10. The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, by John V. Petrocelli
I read this book shortly before I posted my newsletter, Gurus and The Science of Bullshit. I even cited it a few times. Don’t let the title fool you, the book isn't solely about detecting bullshit. It is a far more in-depth analysis on the topic of bullshit and is a pretty good review of where the literature stands overall.
Petrocelli opens with the then-current example of Kyrie Irving's Flat-Earth fiasco. For those who don’t remember, Kyrie Irving became the poster child for the flat earth movement after he said, flat out, “The Earth is flat.” during an interview. In subsequent interviews, he claimed that he “knows the science” and encouraged the listeners to “do some research.” This is a classic bullshitter move - ignore the evidence and claim that the truth is still out there; if you can’t find it, then you aren’t trying hard enough. This was the perfect example to open the book with, as it is exactly what *not to do* if you are trying to have accurate beliefs. Petrocelli argues for the alternative, i.e., the scientific method, and explains how bullshit undermines it.
Importantly, he distinguishes lying from bullshit: lying is an intentional act to obscure the truth, whereas bullshit operates without regard for the truth whatsoever and instead pursues other goals, such as inflating one’s knowledge or importance. Bullshit and lying serve two separate functions, and therefore lead to different outcomes. As Petrocelli writes in the book, “lying can get you fired, whereas bullshit can get you promoted to CEO.”
In later chapters, Petrocelli talks about the psychology of gullibility, decision making, in which situations bullshit is likely to occur, and how to recognize bullshit in the wild.
9. A Lot of People are Saying, by Russel Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
I read this book when I was just starting to get into the literature on conspiracism, and the book continues to be influential in how I think about the topic today. The book makes a strong case that we are now living in a new age of conspiracism.
Conspiracy theories used to be about powerful groups conspiring against the common good for their own benefit. The old conspiracists used to fancy themselves as “Truth Seekers,” contributing to some sort of investigation. They employed pseudo-evidence, leading to theories that were highly specific, developed, and rigid (e.g., think of the 9/11 truther conspiracies, or the conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination). The authors call this age of conspiracism “Classical Conspiracism.”
Contrast this with the conspiracism of today, where conspiracy theories seem to have almost no narrative at all. They more accurately resemble an ‘anti-narrative’ against the mainstream (e.g., “Psht, Fake news”; “We are being lied to.”; “Just asking questions here.”; “Do you really think that… [insert plausible and probably mainstream narrative here]”). Unlike Classical Conspiracism, which is devoted to discovering an alternative truth, New Conspiracism is devoted to rejecting the mainstream narrative. The goals of New Conspiracism are not to connect the dots but to delegitimize institutions, derange discourse, and distort the very meaning of truth. Finally, New Conspiracists scrap the rigidity of Classical Conspiracism, allowing for increased elasticity for their theories - a goalpost with wheels.
The book goes through many illustrative examples defending its thesis, with each chapter homing in on another characteristic that differentiates the old conspiracism from the new. I’ve only provided a little taster here, but if you are at all interested in political psychology, this one is for you.
8. Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie
Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie was an incredibly fun read. It goes through much of what has afflicted science in the past, and why much of the literature today is unreplicable, unreliable, and untrustworthy. To be clear, Ritchie is not coming from an anti-science perspective - quite the contrary. Rather, he outlines the ways in which science has drifted from its core aims and principles. He is advocating for the use of science to defend it against itself.
The book’s main themes focus on the role that fraud, negligence, and hype can play in shoddy science. He opens the book with a study on precognition. The referenced study found that participants were able to guess an object behind a screen with over 53% accuracy, making the case for extrasensory perception. When other researchers attempted to replicate the finding, they got nothing… every time. Despite this, the original researcher maintains his position as professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Ritchie uses this example to point to a larger theme within psychological research. That is, the widespread failures in replicating the most sensational findings within the field. This is called the replication crisis, which Ritchie goes into some detail about. Even the most famous studies taught to undergrads worldwide had dubious methods (e.g., The Milgram Experiment; The Stanford Prison Experiment). The problem is so bad that 2% of all researchers admit to faking their data. And those are just the ones who are willing to admit to the biggest taboo in science.
Ritchie goes through the incentives that motivate researchers to “torture the data” (e.g., publication bias), common ways researchers like to cook the books (e.g., p-hacking), how these fraudulent findings get published (e.g., in predatory journals), and what should be done in the future (e.g., more pre-registration!). In the appendices of the book, he covers some of the best practices for how to properly read a scientific article.
This book provides a wealth of resources for those who want to be able to read scientific literature with a critical eye or who want to become ethical scientists themselves. Recommend to a general audience and academics alike.
8a. The Quick Fix, by Jesse Singal (Technically not counted in the list)
I’ll also quickly recommend here The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal which dives at similar topics in a different - albeit highly enjoyable - way. Specifically, he looks at why some of the least supported findings within psychology are so wildly popular (e.g., nudges, grit, power posing, IATs, subliminal messages, and more). Singal’s take-home message is that we find these topics alluring and let them pass with scant evidence because they are simple and easily graspable. In other words, they provide us with a “quick fix.”
The only reason I didn’t include this book is because of its similarity to Science Fictions, which I enjoyed *ever so slightly* more. Science Fictions is written for more of an academic audience (but is still accessible to a wider audience), whereas The Quick Fix is written more for a general audience (but still stimulating to academics).
7. The Constitution of Knowledge, by Jonathan Rauch
As the title suggests, this book is all about knowledge. Rauch describes knowledge as an ongoing process - not something to be arrived at all at once. He illustrates this through the retelling of a conversation between Socrates and his disciple, Plato. After a probing dialogue between the two, Socrates ends by saying, “Let’s meet here again tomorrow.”
Rauch utilizes his insights as a journalist to nail down some of the essential components that allow us to arrive at true knowledge, such as prize accuracy, seeking multiple sources, and correcting errors. Similarly, there are some best practices in intellectual integrity, such as abjuring jargon, longwindedness, extravagance, and opinion.
The complete inversion of these principles is exemplified by figures like Donald Trump, who views error correction as a sign of crookedness, doesn’t rely on any sources for his claims, and who can give an hour-long speech without conveying anything of substance.
To protect democracy against such figures, Rauch argues that we should hold the fundamental principles of knowledge sacrosanct, comparable to the constitution of the United States. From these principles, we can derive The Constitution of Knowledge as our guiding star in times of epistemic crisis. Rauch likens the Constitution of Knowledge to liberalism’s “epistemic operating system,” or the social rules that turn disagreement into knowledge.
Rauch outlines in the book how we got where we are, and which human tendencies steer us away from the truth (e.g., motivated reasoning, the illusion of asymmetric insight, groupthink, and so on). He also uses historical examples within journalism detailing how we got certain stories wrong, and how we got them right.
Wikipedia, for example, embodies some of the most important epistemic rules laid out in the book. Recall the analogy of knowledge as an ongoing conversation. Rather than building a platform, Wikipedia has built a community, dedicated to neutrality, reliability, and verifiability. They block contributors who repetitively put out misleading information. And importantly, there is only one page per topic, so everyone is being provided the same information, as opposed to an algorithm providing different people with different information.
If we are to overcome our bullshit-prone tendencies, we should try to replicate these systems of knowledge and limit exposure to those actively opposed to them.
6. The Sweet Spot, by Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is one of my favorite writers of all time. Somehow his words seem to leap off the page. That is only one of the reasons that his newest book made it on this list.
The Sweet Spot, previously titled The Pleasures of Suffering, is one of his best. Bloom makes the case that a truly meaningful life often comes at the cost of some suffering. In fact, there are many instances wherein we choose to suffer. Scary movies are thrilling because they scare us; they are bad when they don’t. BDSM is fun for people because of the pain; it would be less kinky for both parties if it were painless. People climb Mount Everest because it is unlikely that they will reach the peak; if it were easy, doing so wouldn’t be as rewarding.
Conversely, these activities can lose their appeal by becoming too intense. Nobody would watch scary movies if they actually expected a demon to crawl out of their TV. If BDSM truly resembled torture, then it would likely become less sexually invigorating. If instead of snow, Mount Everest was covered with fire, few would attempt the climb.
In other words, there is a ‘sweet spot’ for suffering to be worth enduring. We like to suffer about as much as the experience is worth. Make the experience too easy, and it is reduced to mundanity. Make it too hard, and the experience just sucks. Throughout the book, Bloom explains why - and when - we derive pleasure from suffering, and how we derive meaning from these experiences.
5. Not Born Yesterday, by Hugo Mercier
This was definitely one of the more hopeful books I have read this year, and it inspired my newsletter Are We too Gullible or too Skeptical?
Mercier argues that humans really aren’t as gullible as they are made out to be. He first scrutinizes the research on conformity, which can make it seem like we’ll do anything if others are doing it. To be fair, there are many real and consequential biases related to conformity (e.g., success bias, prestige bias), but Mercier argues that the power of these biases is finite, and they aren’t nearly as powerful as we give them credit for.
The biggest thing conformity research misses is that we are often the ones who would like to persuade or manipulate others. To support his point, Mercier first pulls from the relevant evolutionary literature. One of my favorite examples from the book is Mercier’s ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ analogy, which states that while humans must remain open to many foods (i.e., explanations), we must maintain a watchful eye for poisonous foods (i.e., false explanations). In other words, openness and vigilance coevolved so that we could consider different possibilities whilst remaining skeptical. This is a common theme throughout the book.
We appear gullible when we’re not incentivized to accept the truth, or when arguing simply isn’t worth the trouble. We can form more accurate beliefs when we look at the incentives at play (e.g., the desire to get published and the bias for flashy new results). In other words, we often use our beliefs to justify what we wanted to do anyway.
Mercier continues to defend his thesis by providing evidence of our demonstrable abilities to evaluate others’ competence, recognize those who share our incentives, and expedite the spread of information through gossip.
Another big thing that the humans-are-gullible camp misses is that we’re much more likely to ignore or reject claims than we are to take them at face value, especially if they are unappealing or inconsistent with our views. The history of social justice supports this claim; it is usually the good arguments that win in the end.
The conclusion of the book is that influencing people isn't too easy, but too hard. Fake news and conspiracy theories persist not because people aren’t vigilant enough, but because they aren’t open enough.
4. The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef
This is actually the book that inspired me to start this newsletter, and my first post was largely based on it.
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef is a spectacular book packed with practical wisdom. The book makes the case that we get things wrong mainly because we adopt a militaristic, defensive approach to decision-making (i.e., soldier mindset) over one that is more curious and objective (i.e., scout mindset).
Soldiers stick to their guns and don’t make much of a habit of examining the evidence. They think fast and do their best to protect themselves and defeat the enemy.
The Scout is just the opposite. Their job is to understand and to know what is really there, as accurately as possible. When a scout finds out they’re wrong, they revise their beliefs, rather than double down on them.
The soldier asks “Can I believe this?” or “Must I believe this?” whereas the scout asks, “Is it True?”
Throughout the book, Galef describes how the militaristic mindset leads us to get things wrong, how the scout mindset can correct course, and when we are most likely to adopt one mindset over the other. Most importantly, she outlines the important role that rationality plays in productive conversation, decision-making, and understanding the world.
3. Rationality, by Steven Pinker
That leads me to the next book on my list, Rationality, by Steven Pinker. Nobody has influenced my writing more than this man. Although The Scout Mindset inspired my first post in this newsletter, Rationality planted the seed.
He kicks off the book by dispelling the cliché that humans are irredeemably irrational. In the environment of our ancestors, our brains are almost perfectly rational. Not only that, but even with our ‘cavemen minds’, we have discovered the laws of nature, built cities from the earth, and irradicated almost every threat that killed our ancestors. In other words, we are pretty good at using what we’ve got.
In the book, Pinker defines Rationality as “the use of knowledge to attain goals.” Thus, depending on our goal, even the most seemingly irrational acts can be done rationally (e.g., hypothetically, if your goal is to bruise your head, it is perfectly rational to bang your head on the wall until it bruises).
Pinker also goes through the rational justifications for some of our most notorious fallacies. Consider the conjunction fallacy (this example comes from one of the exhibits at the CDR’s Mindworks, where I work):
“Sharon is a high school student. She recently moved to a new town where she didn’t know anyone. She joined the debate team hoping to meet new people and quickly made friends with her teammates. Which is more likely: “Sharon goes to the school dance”, or “Sharon goes to the dance with one of her debate teammates.”
Statistically, option one is actually more likely to be true, but most of us assume that the correct answer is option two. That is, we make the mistake of thinking that two events occurring at the same time are more likely than just one event occurring.
Though option 1 is statistically true, it might be practically false. Most of the people we come across in daily life don’t provide us with useless information just to trick us. Therefore, if our goal is to hold accurate beliefs while engaging with real people, rather than getting the correct answer on brain teasers, it might be more rational to go with option 2.
He also disputes other alleged fallacies such as the “hot hand” fallacy, which is actually a fallacy in and of itself. He calls this the “hot hand fallacy fallacy.” In a nutshell, the hot hand fallacy neglects how confidence and skill play into our performance, and basically reduces athletes down to roulette wheels.
Pinker spends a good amount of pages defending rationality. In a world that increasingly seems ‘post-truth’, rationality seems to be losing its spark. Some even argue that rationality is itself just one way of thinking, particularly a privileged one. But a world without rationality is incoherent. You can’t actually make an argument against rationality without using it by employing reasons. That is, if you are making an argument against rationality, then you have already lost it.
Though I didn’t have the space to cover it here, Pinker also gets into more technical topics such as bayesian reasoning, game theory, logic, critical thinking, and other tools for thinking. I could write a book about this book, but I would suggest that you just go and read Steve’s.
2. What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill
No movement suffers more from undeserved ridicule than the effective altruism movement, which simply aims at finding the most effective ways to help others. Really. That’s it. William MacAskill, one of effective altruism’s biggest stars, is, unfortunately, one of the main targets of this criticism. Probably because he makes the case for effective altruism so damn hard to argue with, and critics see this as a challenge.
In any case, What We Owe the Future by Will MacAskill completely changed my thinking about a topic that I didn’t even know I had opinions about. Specifically, MacAskill argues that the future is far more important than we give it credit for, and even more important than we could possibly conceive.
Here, he makes the case that future people, or potential people, are just as important as those who are alive today. To make this easier to grasp, try to view all humans as one organism that has the potential to live forever (Not sure if that actually makes this easier to think about but just roll with me). This mega-human organism should think not just about short-term thrills but also about the whole course of its life ahead.
Similarly, every decision you make now can drastically impact the lives of those to come. Think about the decisions of your parents that led to you. My parents met as coworkers in a New York Diner called Friendly’s. Imagine if they hadn’t applied to that job, or quit early because the job sucked? What if my dad decided to keep his terrible bull-cut - would my mother even have batted an eye? I was also an ‘oops’ child - I wouldn’t be here if the contraceptive had worked. If I wasn’t the one in a billion sperm cells to reach the egg… Okay, gross. Moving on.
The same goes for our decisions now and the future of humanity. Even decisions that seem trivially small compound in significance over time. MacAskill also addresses often boring and hard-to-grasp topics in an impressively readable way. The book goes through population ethics, the risks of catastrophe, the probability that we would recover from catastrophe, and other topics.
This was the first book I read this year, and it held that spot - All. Year. Long. - despite having read many exceptional books. Until I read this, I thought the hard problem of consciousness (i.e., “Why do some organisms have a subjective experience? How can we verify that they do?”) was a problem consigned to philosophy, forever; unable to be empirically tested. After all, science aspires toward an objective account of reality, whereas consciousness is inherently subjective. So how can we possibly study it?
For anything to be studiable, you have to be able to measure something. Seth explains that we can now measure consciousness to some extent via the zip-and-zap meter. There are flaws with the scale, but perhaps the most pressing is that we can’t even know what the measurement means. There are a few theoretical action items to be addressed first.
The first action item on the list is to know what you’re attempting to measure, and in what unit you’re measuring it. My favorite theory of consciousness presented in the book is called Integrated-Information Theory (IIT). That is, consciousness is not only information (if it were, then a computer would be conscious - very conscious), but integrated information. Integrated information can be measured in Phi, or how much more a system is than “the sum of its parts.” Zero Phi contains either no information (e.g., light, which is 1 bit. On or off) or no integration (e.g., a phone screen, which is thousands of individual pixels). From IIT, we can deduce that the cerebellum, for example, has low Phi (i.e., low consciousness) because though it contains a vast number of neurons, they are all semi-independent.
I’ll leave it there to restrain myself from getting too far into the weeds here, but Seth also goes into topics such as qualia, perception as a ‘controlled hallucination’, the neural correlates of consciousness, the self, free-will, consciousness in animals and AI, and other topics. This book is a trip, and it is gripping from start to finish. Recommend to all conscious beings.
And that’s it for my top ten list of 2022. To reiterate, any of these books could have ended up as #1, and this ranking is kinda just based on how I’m feeling right now. There were also many books that I wanted to add to this list, but couldn’t because I was determined to narrow it down to ten. This was an incredible year in books for me, so I sincerely hope you will check some of these out, or at least bookmark them for later.
Lastly, if you want to stay up-to-date on what I am reading, follow my Goodreads account. If not, I had a blast writing this and look forward to writing more about the books I’m reading in the new year. Thanks for reading!
If you found these reviews interesting and would like to buy any of the books, please do so by clicking the hyperlinked titles. This allows me to make a small commission from your purchase so that I can keep these book reviews free for all. Thanks for reading!
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