Photo by Wil C. Fry, 2021
★★★★ (of 5)
- Full Title: The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe: How To Know What’s Really Real In A World Increasingly Full Of Fake
- Author: Dr. Steven Novella, with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein
- Year: 2018
- Pages: 458*
- Genre: Science, Skepticism, Critical Thinking
- Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (Hachette)
- ISBN 978-1-5387-6052-9 (trade paperback)
- Wikipedia page
- Author’s Wikipedia page
(* 458 pages does not include introduction, acknowledgements, references, or index)
Summary
If you’re familiar at all with my personal development over the past decade or more, specifically the parts where I became convinced of anthropogenic global warming (2012) and later explored in-depth my position on religious belief (2014-present), then it won’t surprise you that I knew of Dr. Steven Novella before this book. In the early 2010s, when I spent a lot of time scouring the internet trying to sort out what was false and what was true about global warming, I first came across the “skeptical community”, a descriptive term for an otherwise difficult to define group of people. That community included Novella and his various presences on the web — including his blog Neurologica and the SGU page on Facebook. (I also became aware of the SGU podcast, but I do not listen to podcasts, so...) I immediately warmed to the fair and even-handed approach of Novella and his band of skeptics, the way he carefully explained complex scientific discoveries or ideas in layman’s terms, and the various methodologies he employs to shoot down pseudoscience, woo, and a host of logical fallacies.
This book is an outgrowth of the SGU podcast, due to listeners asking for “a thorough guide to all of the concepts we reference regularly on the show” (page 446). It aims to fortify the reader against the “forces of ignorance, conspiracy thinking, anti-intellectualism, and science denial” (page xix). It lists and explains numerous cognitive features/bugs that humans experience, including our overactive pattern-seeking functions and faulty memories, and then explores numerous ways in which our own reasoning can easily mislead us (cognitive biases), logical fallacies, the differences between science and pseudoscience, how the news media regularly fails its readers when reporting on science, and more.
Praise
The book is thorough, well-written, and well-researched. The primary author, Novella, is a neurologist at Yale University, but he is also a longtime science communicator and leader of the skeptic community. He and his accomplices are well-versed in the numerous forms of woo and fraud that masquerade as “alternative medicine” and other harmful practices, not to mention the numerous medieval-era beliefs that continue to plague our society.
Maybe the best thing about the book is that it isn’t at all about winning arguments or proving wrong the fraudsters — rather it is about training oneself to recognize one’s own biases and faulty logic. Novella makes repeated note of the fact that all of us suffer from tricks of the brain; not just the people we disagree with. A natural result of recognizing bad logic and various biases is eventually seeing through the false information all around us, but (Novella says) we don’t need to use this newfound ability like a weapon, but rather a tool. Humility is key.
Points Off For...
I found that several items were repeated throughout the book, not merely for emphasis, but almost as if each chapter was written as a separate essay, which required certain ideas to be explained each time (rather than referring to an earlier instance where it was previously explained in full). This wasn’t horrible, and could actually be useful for someone not reading the book straight through. But it made the book longer than it needed to be.
Conclusion
Over the past decade, if you noticed in my blog entries all the references to logical fallacies or various cognitive biases, that arose in my thinking due to extensive research among various skeptical websites — Novella’s among them. This book is a guide that I could have used many years earlier, and I highly recommend it.
(I do NOT recommend gifting this book to a friend or relative who you suspect of falling for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and the like. It would be better just to talk to them. Probably.)
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